Customers expect more from brands than ever before. Not just speed, convenience or a smooth process, but experiences that leave them feeling reassured, valued and understood.
Yet many organisations are still measuring customer experience (CX) in ways that don’t reflect how customers actually feel.
While expectations have changed, the metrics used to manage CX have barely evolved. Satisfaction scores, effort measures and journey KPIs were built for a simpler, more transactional world. They capture what happened, but not how it felt. They tell you whether a task was completed, not whether trust was built or eroded along the way. And that distinction matters.
Customers don’t remember process steps or channels. They remember how an experience made them feel. Trust is the biggest driver of loyalty and advocacy, yet it remains the least measured dimension of experience.
As experiences become more complex and expectations continue to rise, the gap between what customers expect and what organisations measure keeps widening. When metrics fail to evolve with the customer, they stop guiding the business.
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The missing dimension: why trust matters
Customers stay because they feel confident in you. They spend more because they feel reassured and valued. They forgive mistakes because they feel understood. And they advocate because they feel a sense of belonging.
Reassurance, ease, confidence, delight and acceptance build trust and strengthen relationships over time. Whereas frustration, anxiety, confusion or feeling undervalued quietly weaken them, often long before churn shows up in the data.
This is what makes trust such a powerful leading indicator. It reveals experience issues earlier than falling NPS scores, rising complaints or lost revenue. By the time traditional metrics move, the damage is often already done.
More than 80 per cent of human decision-making is influenced by emotion (Psychology UK) – even in categories that consider themselves rational, from financial services and utilities to telecoms and B2B technology. Emotion is always present, trust is always affected. The only question is whether you’re measuring it.
What is return on trust
Not all interactions build or erode trust in the same way, or have the same impact.
We can measure where and how much trust shows up in your experience, and make those differences visible.
We focus on three core questions:
- Where is trust present across your customer journeys and at what level?
- What is the risk of not addressing the trust gaps in your customer experience?
- Where should you invest to create trust to deliver financial impact?
Put simply, our trust score tells you whether your experience is creating the trust that drives long-term value.
Why measuring trust is essential for modern CX
Traditional CX metrics were never designed to measure trust.
They focus on transactions rather than relationships, highlight outcomes rather than causes, and tell you if customers were satisfied, not whether they felt cared for, recognised or confident. They offer limited predictive power for loyalty, forgiveness or future spend.
As a result, CX teams can improve scores while missing the real drivers of growth.
Without understanding how customers feel, experience improvements become reactive and superficial – fixing symptoms rather than addressing root causes.
If you want to provide experiences that genuinely build trust, you have to measure the interactions that drive it. Joy and anticipation consistently show the strongest link to trust and long-term value.
The commercial advantage of building and maintaining trust
We link customer trust to your bottom line by analysing customer feedback across calls, chats, complaints, reviews and survey comments to identify how customers feel in their own words.
Powered by Adoreboard, a predictive insights platform, trust is scored based on both the presence and intensity of how customers feel, then classified as drivers that build or erode trust.
Trust is mapped to journey touchpoints, revealing where value is being created and where friction is forming. This makes it possible to see which moments build confidence, create reassurance, and where anxiety or frustration is triggered.
This enables us to provide actionable insights. Leaders can see where improving trust will deliver the greatest return – not just in CX scores, but in financial impact, too.
In crowded markets where products and services feel increasingly interchangeable, trust becomes one of the few sustainable differentiators. The trust you build is harder to copy than what you sell.
Why trust is the CX metric that matters
Trust brings humanity back into CX measurement. It reveals what customers truly need in order to return and recommend you. It shifts leadership focus away from moving scores by a point or two and towards creating lasting value.
Trust reframes CX from score-keeping to value creation – from reporting the past to shaping the future.
As customer expectations continue to evolve, organisations that want loyalty can no longer afford to ignore trust. They must measure it, manage it and design for it with the same discipline they apply to cost and revenue.
Do you want to understand how trust is impacting your customer experience? Get in touch.
