Fostering Trust in a Virtual World
Consider this quote as you contemplate your practice: The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. ~Ernest Hemingway
Good day, dear Talking About Money Community, I hope that you are hanging in there. 👍🏼
How has your interaction with your clients and learners evolved in the past 18 months? I know that when the pandemic and associated quarantine first started, most of you went home and started to conduct your services virtually. For many if not most of you, this was the first time that you met with your clients in ways that were not face-to-face. Sure, you may have met a client in your office parking lot to look at or copy documents, but for the most part, you stopped seeing your clients in person.
The good part about hopping online was that you were able to continue to provide high quality services to your existing clients. The downside was, you did not take on any new clients, even though you knew that there were others in your community that needed a hand.
At this point you are most likely seeing new clients. Many of these folks are word-of-mouth referrals from your satisfied customers, most likely friends or family of your existing clients, people who can sing your praises. And this is good; word-of-mouth referrals tend to be the gold standard, as your happy clients serve as a trusted referral source for your new clients. You are starting off on the right foot.
But is that all you need? Once the hand-off is made from your satisfied customer, it is up to you to maintain trust and understanding in this new relationship. And as opposed to the “before times” when your in-person clients seamlessly transferred into the virtual world, this time you are beginning that trust building online, and you need to maintain momentum so that your clients can do their best work.
This trust building might take place in one-to-one counseling or coaching sessions or in one-to-many group workshops. Whether you are trying to establish trust with 1 person or 100, there are strategies that you can employ to amplify your chance at success.
Let’s look at a few tools that you can add to your toolbox:
Be Clear and Welcoming in Your Onboarding Process
While your agency most likely has intake paperwork that your new client needs to complete, it’s helpful if you can keep it at a minimum so that you do not overwhelm your clients before you get to know them. While you are collecting demographic information from your client, you can start building your relationship with them by asking them about themselves:
What they define as success, and what their ideal outcome is
Their beliefs and values, and distinguishing characteristics that they are proud of
Hobbies and/or interests that they would like to share with you
People like to talk about themselves (or is it just me?). When your new client is reaching out to you through a virtual space to work on something as stress- and shame-inducing as their personal finances, make room for them to engage with you on things that they are proud of. Maybe they are proud parents of a pandemic puppy, or maybe their victory garden is giving them a lot of pleasure. Someone close to me has clocked 100+ days of 10,000+ daily steps on their FitBit, and they love to talk about it. 🚶🏼♀️
Be Proactive and Establish Structure in Your Communication
While trust naturally builds over time in the in-person world, you will need to take the lead and create a more structured communication cadence with your clients online. At first you may feel like you are reaching out to them too much, like you are some weird financial capability stalker. But don’t worry, the more you communicate with your clients or students, the better.
Let’s think about the level of communication needed to foster trust among an online financial literacy workshop. You might be meeting once a week, in the evening, after your participants have completed long days of work or parenting (or both). They are bone-tired, and even though they voluntarily signed up for your workshop, their motivation to attend is lagging.
What’s a financial educator to do? For one, don’t leave all the communication for the online class itself. How can you connect with your students throughout the week, so that when it is time to log on to class, your learners are excited and eager to attend?
On tool to consider is a message schedule, when you send your group messages at regular intervals throughout the week. When I teach online, I send messages on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. The content of the message can vary – talk about what participants can look forward to in the next workshop, provide them with a link to a news article that is pertinent to what you are talking about in class, or take a quick poll by posing a question and then asking participants to hit “reply all” and respond with a word or short phrase. The key is to continually remind your learners that you are thinking about them and that you care about their experience in your program.
Embrace Small Talk
Remember the “before times” when a financial capability client would come to your actual physical office? Can you picture it?
Your receptionist would call you to let you know that they were there, and you would walk down the hall to the waiting area to greet them. You might comment on what they were wearing or asked if they had done something new with their hair. If you had already started building rapport with that person, you might ask about their family, or how the school year is going for their kids. Maybe you would just talk about the weather (“It’s so hot! But I hear that there is rain in the forecast – that should cool things down”). By the time you got back to your office, you would have been in a more comfortable place and ready to start talking about the topic of the session.
What happens now that you are conducting your sessions on video? You are a busy professional and might be tempted to get right into the meat of the meeting, not to waste time with superfluous chit-chat. Please reconsider. Prepare for the meeting by mentally thinking through the arc of a conversation, and intentionally start your sessions with small talk. This breaks the ice, builds rapport, provides you with time to make sure that everyone’s tech is working, and let’s you take a breath before diving back into the technical work that you are so good at.
