Trust me, I’m a disrupter

Growing up, there are a few golden rules most parents lay down about strangers. Don’t get in a car with a stranger. Don’t touch a stranger’s dog. Don’t accept sweets from strangers.

What we all learned was pretty clear: don’t trust people you don’t know.

It’s fair to say then that the idea of a sharing economy goes against all our intuitions. Nowhere is that more true than here in the UK — most of us struggle to share a joke on a train with a stranger, never mind a room in our flat.

But these days, we’re offering up our homes, cars, pets and power drills with anyone and everyone. Airbnb, Lyft, Uber, BlaBlaCar, DogVacay and Streetbank are just a handful of the companies that sit under the broad (and often ambiguous) sharing economy umbrella — all make us take that leap of faith with someone we don’t know, and all have enjoyed significant success.

There are a couple of big reasons why these businesses work. Price is a big one. I do care about the future of London black cabs, but not enough to pay an extra £20 every time I want go home from a regrettable night out. And I enjoy an ‘all you can eat’ hotel buffet breakfast as much as the next man, but if there’s an Airbnb down the street for half the price, I’ll probably just stay there and bring my own Weetabix.

Sharing stuff has become fashionable, too. It’s the same mentality that’s seen second-hand morph into vintage. Try to sell your Dad’s old denim shorts at Portobello Market as second-hand middle-class fashion and you’re going to have a long day. But label them Notting Hill Sixties Vintage and you’ll be fighting off the hipsters. Whatever the socio-economic reasons driving this cultural change, the brands that have brought us the sharing economy are reaping the benefits — getting an Uber back to your AirBnb on a city break in Berlin is as desirable as it is affordable.

But whilst price and cool have been enough to win over the hearts and wallets of millions of first-time users, alone they’re not enough. The sharing economy has also had to navigate a much bigger issue to keep its customers coming back for more. That issue is trust.

Trust in the people you’re sharing with, lending to, or borrowing from is what makes this economy work. And the more that trust grows, the more we trust the brands that are facilitating the sharing, too.

At the heart of it, the sharing economy is putting emphasis back on face-to-face engagements and real relationships between businesses and their customers. It’s here that real trust can be earned, and where the sharing economy has a clear competitive advantage over big organisations.

“The biggest challenge big business has is in breaking down unwieldy, bureaucratic structures to create the kind of face-to-face engagement that builds trust.” (Robert Schiller, Professor of Economics at Yale).

More than being ahead of big companies in building trust, the sharing economy is actually beginning to redefine what trust means for big business as well. We’re witnessing a shift in the whole notion of what trust means for companies, large and small.

“People are losing belief in the big, hierarchical businesses that control our lives. The collaborative economy breaks these big, hierarchical businesses down, and is helping us shift from an age of regulatory and institutional trust (or mistrust) towards social trust.” (Rachel Botsman, lecturer on collaborative economies at Saïd Business School).

To keep pace, big business is having to behave differently. This is made clear when you see that the industries getting disrupted are often those with trust issues, like banking. And this change in behaviour will be a change for good. The sharing economy may well be the light at the end of the tunnel for a public frustrated with one ‘business-gate’ after another.

So trust isn’t just important for the sharing economy. It’s vital. It’s the glue that holds the whole thing together. And it’s driving positive change in the ways we all do business. But take that trust away, and the whole thing will come toppling down.

Business models in the sharing economy are, by their nature, high risk. You’re relying on the thousands of people in your community to represent your business and keep your customers happy. When it’s working, these communities are the businesses’ greatest assets. When it doesn’t work, these communities can breakdown trust in seconds.

At the moment, when things go wrong, it pans out a little bit like this. You get in a scrap with your Uber driver or your Airbnb host, lose some money, take a hit on your customer rating and probably your dignity too. Five minutes later you send a strongly worded complaint to the HQ in Silicon Valley, and an over-qualified Harvard graduate responds instantaneously with some charming rhetoric and a full re-fund. All sorted. All forgiven.

But is it? Just how many of these episodes are we willing to put up with before trust breaks down irreversibly? When things go wrong, these businesses have got really good at sweeping things under the carpet. This approach will only work for so long.

The long-term answer for the sharing economy isn’t more of the same. To build meaningful, sustainable relationships with their customers, these businesses need to build genuine trust, not get better at saying sorry.

To maintain and grow trust, businesses at the helm of the sharing economy need to prioritise face-to-face engagement with their customers. They need to put the customer experience first. Fundamentally, they need to exert greater control over their communities as they grow. To do so, there are a number of things they should consider.

Stricter vetting over communities

Make sure the people you have representing your companies ‘in the field’ go through the same rigorous selection process as the ones sitting in your offices. They are the face of your business, and wholly responsible for these engagements where trust is won and lost.

Responsible growth

Don’t get too big, too quick. Never has control over expansion been more important in business than with the sharing economy. The bigger the business, the harder the fall.

Teaching communities to communicate

Your communities are your operations, sales, marketing and business development teams all rolled into one. That’s a lot of responsibility. Make sure they know what to say, how to say it, and when they need to call in help.

The sharing economy is undoubtedly a good thing, for business and for society. Having trust in the people around you is usually a decent sign that things are going well, and the economic and environmental benefits are clear, too.

But the disrupters mustn’t sit still. After all, it was others sitting still that gave them their chance in the first place. They’ve earned our trust. The bigger challenge now is to keep it.