Trust is the foundation of long-term human relationships. It’s also a critical determinant of whether and how people will interact with organizations – those inside (employees) and outside (clients, prospective clients, job candidates, suppliers). Organizations, especially businesses, that design experiences with trust in mind can differentiate themselves in a broader environment where trust appears to be lacking.

Research has shown that while trust in the United States is up slightly from 2024, Americans are far less trusting in institutions than they used to be. The good news for organizations is that according to Edelman, Americans consider businesses to be more trustworthy than other institutions such as governments, NGOs, and the media. Businesses should capitalize on this momentum and invest in building trust, especially in the face of external environments in which trust may become harder to earn and maintain.

Measuring trust has become increasingly popular among organizations looking to understand their evolving relationships with both employees and customers. XM Institute has measured and reported on trust for many years. Despite its universal nature, trust can be difficult to define and measure. Fortunately, research has found that when people evaluate the trustworthiness of people, leaders, and even organizations, they tend to look through three lenses¹:

• Competence: Do you have the ability to deliver on your commitments?
• Integrity: Do you live up to your stated values and standards?
• Benevolence: Do you prioritize doing the right thing for people over short-term financial outcomes?

This year, to develop a more thorough understanding of employee and customer trust, we measured all three components and averaged the ratings into an overall Trust Index.

Based on our analysis, we found that US-based consumers believe organizations have a combined Trust Index rating of 73% favorable. Meanwhile, the Trust Index rating among US employees evaluating their company’s senior leadership came in at 65% favorable. While these two scores are not directly comparable, we find it notable that the American public reports more trust in the brands they interact with than the leadership of the company that they work for.

Consumers Believe in Brands’ Competence

As part of our annual US consumer survey², we asked 10,000 Americans to evaluate whether the brands they recently interacted with display these behaviors on a 5-point scale of never to all of the time.

• Consumers provided a Trust Index rating of 73% favorable. Across 354 brands and the three trust components, consumers provided an average Trust Index rating of 73% favorable. A bank rates highest out of all brands, at 87%, while a hotel rates lowest, at 57%.
• Brands most frequently impressed on Competence. Consumers said that brands deliver the products/services they promised either most or all the time at an average rate of 77%, the strongest rating across the three trust components. A grocer has the highest Competence rating (92%), while a hotel received the lowest Competence rating (56%).
• Integrity received a middling evaluation. On average, consumers said brands use fair business practices at a rate of 74%. A bank’s consumers gave this component the highest rating of 88%, while a utility company received the lowest assessment of Integrity (58%).
• Benevolence is the lowest-scoring component of trust. Consumers were least likely to believe that brands prioritize doing the right thing by customers over short term financial outcomes either most or all the time, with an average rating of 68%, 9 points lower than Competence and 6 points lower than Integrity. Consumers rated a bank’s Benevolence most highly (82%), while a social media platform received the lowest overall Benevolence rating (47%).

Employees Evaluate Trust in Senior Leadership

In a separate study conducted globally, American employees evaluated their trust in their organization’s senior leadership across Competence, Integrity, and Benevolence³.

From 3,724 US employees’ responses, we learned that:

• Employees rated trust in their senior leadership at 65% favorable. Top-level leaders (VP and C-suite) gave the highest Trust scores, at 83%, followed by directors and mid-management (77%). Individual contributors gave the lowest Trust rating, at 56%.
• Senior leaders most frequently impressed on Competence. 70% of employees agreed that their senior leadership teams have the skills and knowledge needed to do their job well, the highest rating among the trust components. Employees with the longest tenure – 10 years or more – were the least likely to rate this component favorably (63%).
• Benevolence is the weakest component among employees. Similar to consumers, American employees said that senior leaders prioritize people’s wellbeing above immediate profit and gains, at a rate of 56% favorable. Benevolence ratings are 12 points below Integrity and 14 points below Competence. Younger employees were most likely to give a favorable rating (64% 18-24yo, 63% 25-34yo), while employees 55 years or older provided the lowest ratings of senior leader Benevolence (42%).

Trust Varies by Industry

When diving deeper into consumer trust in the United States, we were able to examine Trust Index ratings across 22 industries and found that:

• Grocery stores and consumer payments are most trusted by consumers. On average, consumers provided the highest Trust Index to the grocery and consumer payments industries (77%), followed by the retail and banking industries (76%). Grocery stores score highest across all three components, tying only with investment firms on Benevolence ratings (72%) and consumer payments and banks on Competence (82%).
• Consumers considered TV/ISP to be the least trustworthy. TV/Internet service providers received the lowest Trust Index rating of 67% along with the lowest Competence (70%) and Benevolence (62%) ratings. Car rental and utility companies shared the lowest Integrity ratings with TV/ISP, at 69% each.
• Consumers evaluate trust components similarly across industries. Trust Index component rankings are consistent across all industries – Competence remains the highest-scoring component across all 22 industries, while Benevolence remains the lowest-scoring component for all industries.

While we are not able to examine employee sentiment across industries in the United States, we found Trust Index ratings for employees globally across 21 industries range between 49% favorable and 75% favorable – a 26-point gap. IT employees globally reported the most trust in their senior leaders, while global public sector and non-profit employees were the least likely to believe in their senior leaders’ Competence, Integrity, and Benevolence.

Trust and Consumer Loyalty Behaviors

Naturally, consumer trust is strongly correlated with customer experience – the 2024 XMI Customer Ratings – Overall ratings have a correlation coefficient of .67 with our Trust Index – but trust is also strongly correlated with three key loyalty behaviors: likelihood to repurchase from the brand, likelihood to forgive if the brand delivers a bad experience, and likelihood to recommend the brand to friends or family.

In fact, our Trust Index is more strongly correlated with these loyalty behaviors than perceived value of a brand’s offerings. We also asked consumers to evaluate the degree to which brands’ products and services are worth the price and found that our Trust Index was more strongly related to consumer likelihood to repurchase, forgive, and recommend than whether something is worth the price or a good deal.

Upon diving further into the relationship between consumer loyalty behaviors and the Trust Index across 22 consumer-facing industries, we found that:

• Net Promoter Score is most affected by consumer trust. The Trust Index has a correlation coefficient with NPS of .70, the highest among the three loyalty behaviors. Consumers with high Trust Index ratings provided an average NPS of 49, a score 104 points higher than that given by consumers with low Trust Index ratings.
• Consumer evaluation of Competence creates the largest gap in loyalty. Consumers who provide high Competence ratings are more likely to repurchase, recommend (NPS), and forgive versus those who give low Competence ratings. This gap in loyalty behavior is larger than those created by high versus low Benevolence or Integrity ratings.
• Differences in Integrity ratings create the smallest gaps in loyalty. Consumers who gave low Integrity ratings are just 44 points less likely to repurchase than those who gave high Integrity ratings. This gap is 47 points for forgiveness and 74 points for NPS.
• Consumers who rate brands high in Benevolence ratings have the strongest loyalty. Consumers who provided high Benevolence ratings are also slightly more likely to forgive, repurchase, and recommend than those who provided high Competence or Integrity ratings. Likelihood to rebuy is +2 points with high Benevolence compared to both high Competence and Integrity. Meanwhile consumers providing strong Benevolence ratings are at least +4 points more likely to Forgiven and +5 points more likely to recommend (NPS).

Trust and Key Employee Attitudes

There are also meaningful correlations among the employee Trust Index and key employee experience measures:

• Employee Trust is strongly correlated with top-line employee attitudes. As anticipated, employee trust in senior leadership was strongly correlated with employee engagement and perceptions of inclusion, wellbeing, and whether employees feel their expectations are met by their employers.
• Trust-building behaviors among leaders drive employee attitudes and the behaviors that result. Our research demonstrates that when employees are engaged, feel included, report positive wellbeing, and believe their expectations are being met (or exceeded), they perform better in their jobs and are more likely to engage in discretionary effort that helps organizations and their customers. These productive (or unproductive) behaviors can often be traced back to trust-building senior leadership behaviors.

Employee Trust Drives Customer Trust

As evidenced by the Service Profit Chain and the more recently derived, Employee Engagement Virtuous Cycle, there is an inherent connection between the attitudes and behaviors of employees and customers.

Through their interactions with an organization’s employees, products, and services, customers develop attitudes that influence their long-term behavior, such as whether they’ll recommend, repurchase, expand usage, or churn. And as we’ve demonstrated in this research, trust plays a significant role in customer behaviors and employee engagement.

Trust is not just a psychological phenomenon. Research has demonstrated that when two people build trust, oxytocin is released. Partially because of this, trust between people – between an employee and a customer for example – is reciprocal. This interplay is exactly what the Employee Engagement Virtuous Cycle predicts. In other words, organizations that don’t prioritize their employees or don’t build trust inside the walls of the organization, will find it far more difficult to build trust with consumers.

Recommendations for Building Trust

Here are a few recommendations we have for organizations looking to build trust with both their employees and customers:

• Focus on your brand promises. Organizations should define a set of brand promises to both employees – often in the form of an Employee Value Proposition (EVP) – and customers that they are committed to keeping. Thoughtfully developed brand promises both help an organization’s identity resonate with target employees and customers and differentiate itself among competitors. The brand promise should clearly point to the experiences employees and customers can expect when interacting with the organization. Align the experiences you deliver to your brand promises and train employees across the organization to act with empathy and execute interactions with your brand promises in mind to cultivate Competence and Integrity.
• Establish and meet (or exceed!) expectations. Provide employees and customers with a clear picture of what they can expect – and then execute on it. Expectation-setting can signal Competence, but the real value is in paying off those expectations, leading people to view organizations as consistent (Integrity).
• Show commitment to resolving people’s problems. Things don’t always go as planned – that’s okay. People are more likely to trust an organization that proactively fixes issues when they arise. When organizations demonstrate their willingness to solve people’s problems and define clear next steps, it signals Benevolence.
• Demonstrate caring. Employees and consumers are more likely to trust organizations when they demonstrate (through action) that they care about their interests (i.e., Benevolence). Organizations should be sensitive to people’s circumstances and emotions and respond with empathy. This is even more essential in high-stress environments in which trust can be naturally harder to earn and maintain. Train front-line employees and managers to acknowledge how people feel, reinforce that they are trying to help, remain calm, and arm them with strategies that will help them avoid becoming defensive.

The bottom line: Build trust with customers and employees while the opportunity is available.

Benjamin Granger, Ph.D., XMP, is Qualtrics’ Chief Workplace Psychologist, XM Institute

Talia Quaadgras is a Research Program Manager with XM Institute