How to build customer trust fast

When shoppers discover new brands, there’s one constant question lingering in the back of their minds: “Can I trust this brand?”

Trust is vital for any relationship to thrive, but here’s the problem. PwC research shows that while 90% of business leaders believe customers trust their brand, only 30% of customers actually do. That gap is huge, and it has knock-on effects. 

Whether they’re booking a vacation, buying new clothes, or signing up for a food service, shoppers want to know if a brand will deliver on its promises. If they don’t trust a brand, they won’t convert. They won’t sign up for email updates, they won’t check out, and they won’t return. 

This is why marketers need to add trust-building features into the customer experience, not just hope it happens. Every interaction is a moment to earn confidence, support decision-making, and encourage the next step in the journey.

The good news is that the tools and content already exist in your tech stack. Reviews and personalization in particular can work together to build, test, and scale trust-building experiences at every stage of the lifecycle.

Here are five practical steps to help you do exactly that.

1. Treat reviews as customer insight, not just reputation management 

Reviews are often used only as social proof — a star rating to be placed on a landing page or in an email footer. While these are great, always-on tactics to reinforce a customer’s trust in your brand, they’re not the only ways reviews could (and should) be used. They’re also powerful as a source of live customer insight.

You can use reviews to: 

• Identify recurring pain points and quick wins
• Uncover what customers value most about the experience
• Inform messaging, offers, and journey design
• Measure sentiment shifts over time

So, it’s important you don’t just collect reviews, but you also analyze, share, and act on insights gathered from them. 

Turning review insights into actionable strategies

Reviews often don’t live in one department. Marketing, customer service, and product teams all have a stake in them, which can mean insights get stuck in different corners of the business. Breaking down these silos ensures reviews drive real improvements and show your customers their feedback matters.

Try these steps:

• Build a simple monthly review insights report
• Share it with customer service, operations, and product teams
• Highlight one change made because of customer feedback
• Communicate those changes back to customers

2. Use personalization to make trust feel relevant to each individual

Trust signals become more meaningful when they are contextual and personal. By combining review data with personalization capabilities like those in Dotdigital, you can: 

• Adapt journeys based on customer behavior and preferences
• Surface relevant reviews for the product, category, or experience being viewed
• Deliver one-to-one content across email, SMS, and on-site experiences

For considered purchases or longer buying cycles common in travel or higher-ticket products, relevance is especially powerful. Showing reviews that match the exact product, destination, or package a shopper is browsing removes uncertainty and supports confident decision-making.

How to create relevant, personalized experiences

Experiences that feel personal and reassure customers at the right moment are huge trust drivers. To create these experiences, you can: 

• Use behavioral data to trigger journeys after browsing or abandonment
• Dynamically insert relevant Trustpilot review content into emails
• Personalize website experiences using recent browsing activity 

3. Place trust signals at critical decision points in the journey

Adding trust signals at key moments can dramatically improve conversion. Reviews help prove your brand is reliable, based on real customer experiences, not just marketing claims. Key moments to prioritize include:

• Comparing options on product or listing pages
• High-intent browsing pages with longer dwell times
• Checkout or basket abandonment
• Landing pages from paid ads and keyword campaigns

Improving trust at decision points

Identify where customers hesitate or reconsider, then use social proof to guide their decision:

• Add Trustpilot widgets or reviews to key conversion pages
• Test with and without reviews to measure impact
• Embed social proof into abandoned browse and cart emails
• Ensure AI and search discovery content include trust signals

Overall, this helps customers answer the question they’re already asking: “Is this a brand I can rely on?”

4. Combine automation with human experience

AI and automation are reshaping how customers discover and interact with brands. But, research also shows many customers still value the ability to connect with real people when they need support. The key is designing automation that feels human. 

To achieve this, marketers can: 

• Automate journeys and recommendations based on real-time customer behavior
• Trigger service recovery flows for negative reviews 
• Use AI to assess sentiment to decide when human outreach is appropriate 
• Ensure communication is timely, transparent, and helpful

Adding a human touch to automated flows 

Trust grows faster when customers feel heard and supported. To maintain a human feel in your automated journeys:

• Route low-rated reviews into nurture workflows
• Follow up visibly when feedback leads to change
• Ensure automated messaging remains clear, empathetic, and honest (adding a human touch to any AI-generated copy)

5. Continuously test, learn, and optimize trust across channels

Trust shifts as expectations, technology, and experiences evolve. To maintain and optimize the experiences you’ve created, it’s important to treat trust as something you measure, experiment with, and improve over time.

Making trust measurable

• A/B test journey variations with and without trust signals
• Measure impact on conversion, rebooking, and lifetime value
• Analyze sentiment alongside performance metrics
• Scale strategies that demonstrably build customer confidence

Final thoughts

Customers don’t just want personalized journeys. They want relevant, reliable experiences delivered by brands they trust.

By adding reviews to personalized customer experiences, marketers can:

• Give customers more confidence during the discovery phase
• Reduce friction and indecision at critical conversion moments
• Strengthen loyalty, in turn driving repeat business
• Turn feedback into a continuous improvement loop

Remember, trust isn’t abstract; it’s an experience you create, step by step, across the entire customer journey.