Customer trust: the hidden obstacle to tech adoption

While near­ly half (45.8%) of UK house­holds are already smart homes, the tech­nol­o­gy can do a lot more than using a smart speak­er to turn on the lights, change a tv chan­nel or con­trol the cen­tral heat­ing. Smart cities, notably in Asia, are pilot­ing con­nec­tiv­i­ty uses that are designed to improve not only con­ve­nience but also sus­tain­abil­i­ty. Street­lights dim when roads are emp­ty, smart traf­fic man­age­ment sys­tems reduce con­ges­tion, sen­sors report flood lev­els – all use­ful solu­tions in our ener­gy-starved, cli­mate-endan­gered world. From smarter trans­porta­tion to con­nect­ed health­care, smart tech­nol­o­gy offers an entic­ing future. 

But not every­one is com­fort­able with the idea that they might, one day, hand over con­trol of many ele­ments of their dai­ly lives to machines – and, more impor­tant­ly, to the com­pa­nies that build them. To do so demands a great deal of con­sumer trust. Trust that the con­sumer may not be quite feel­ing just yet. 

“We’re still very much in the ear­ly adopter phase,” says Mark Evans, man­ag­ing direc­tor of mar­ket­ing and dig­i­tal at Direct Line Group. “Trust is spe­cif­ic and giv­en spar­ing­ly. Peo­ple trust brands to do spe­cif­ic things. But some of it is just about prac­ti­cal­i­ty. How is this tech rel­e­vant? Is it use­ful, too easy or too hard? Do I care about it?”

Then there’s the con­sumer para­dox to con­sid­er. Research shows that con­sumers val­ue data pri­va­cy high­ly. Yet they also show a will­ing­ness to com­pro­mise on those val­ues. One such report from the Data & Mar­ket­ing Asso­ci­a­tion found that, while 82% of glob­al con­sumers want more con­trol over the per­son­al infor­ma­tion they give com­pa­nies, the same num­ber show “no fun­da­men­tal objec­tion to engag­ing with the data econ­o­my”. 

“There’s no doubt that if you make some­thing real­ly easy for cus­tomers, they will go for it and at times even make com­pro­mis­es on what they think is their posi­tion on pri­va­cy,” Evans reveals. 

Mak­ing things easy in the com­plex world of con­nect­ed tech­nolo­gies is, iron­i­cal­ly, more eas­i­ly said than done. Valenti­na Con­ti­ni is an inno­va­tion strate­gist at dig­i­tal agency Dico­ni­um and a for­mer senior engi­neer at Porsche Engi­neer­ing, where she focused on smart mobil­i­ty. “I don’t think I will see this real utopia, where every­thing can be done by sim­ple voice com­mands, in my life­time. I don’t think my kids will see it either because there’s a huge amount at play here.”

Part of the issue seems to be that we’re get­ting ahead of our­selves. Many of the solu­tions we can antic­i­pate, even as con­sumers, are not yet viable. “Take aug­ment­ed real­i­ty glass­es. The tech­nol­o­gy works on smart­phones but we can’t add it into eye­wear because it would just weigh too much right now. Cur­rent tech­no­log­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions mean [devel­op­ment] will hap­pen grad­u­al­ly.”

It also needs to hap­pen grad­u­al­ly for humans to phys­i­o­log­i­cal­ly adapt. “The younger the con­sumer, the eas­i­er it is for them to pick up new tech­nolo­gies and new behav­iours. Old­er peo­ple aren’t less intel­li­gent, it’s just the way our brains work,” Con­ti­ni says. 

And yet com­pa­nies con­tin­ue to inno­vate, hop­ing to bring the con­sumer along with them on the jour­ney. Evans shares hock­ey play­er Wayne Gretzky’s apho­rism that you skate where the puck is going, not where it has been. So, it comes down to get­ting com­fort­able with the imper­fect and tak­ing dif­fer­ent approach­es to build­ing trust. 

Emma Lat­timer is head of mar­ket­ing at Wi-Fi net­work­ing com­pa­ny TP-Link. The com­pa­ny sells a range of smart devices on top of core router tech­nolo­gies, all designed to cre­ate a ‘smarter’ home. “As con­sumers we love con­ve­nience. Smart speak­ers are the gate­way to an evolv­ing smart home ecosys­tem, bring­ing con­ve­nience and use­ful­ness. Smart plugs are pop­u­lar right now because they inform con­sumers about their ener­gy use, so it’s an easy way to be aware of vam­pire devices.”

This incre­men­tal­i­ty in build­ing the smart home is impor­tant because, Lat­timer observes, con­sumers are hap­py to invest a small amount of mon­ey for peace of mind. It’s why smart door­bells and water sen­sors are also gain­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty, although the lat­ter raise the issue once again of people’s abil­i­ty to ‘man­age’ their smart ecosys­tems.

Direct Line Group offers cus­tomers sen­sors that detect water leaks, but Evans explains that cus­tomers “often don’t know where the stop­cock or inlet pipe is or they can’t get to it, or it’s too stiff to turn. When it comes to the nuts and bolts of fit­ting some of these devices, we’re still in an embry­on­ic phase.” No mat­ter how ‘vir­tu­al’ con­nect­ed devices might be, there is still a need for prac­ti­cal, in-per­son sup­port for it to be suc­cess­ful. 

Peer-to-peer endorse­ments, large­ly through user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent, help to bring less con­fi­dent con­sumers along the jour­ney, Lat­timer says. They allow poten­tial cus­tomers to see the real-world appli­ca­tions, not just the (some­times baf­fling) tech­nol­o­gy. For instance, being able to keep an eye on new­born pup­pies in the home while the own­er pops to the shops is more com­pelling than “tech for the sake of it”. 

To fur­ther the con­nec­tiv­i­ty cause, though, there is a need to find a bal­ance between expec­ta­tion and real­i­ty. Con­ti­ni thinks that the real prob­lem with trust­ing the tech­nol­o­gy is our con­di­tion­ing to believe that “with robots and AI, we’ll solve every prob­lem”. The machines are fine but it’s human fail­ings that cause the prob­lems. As a result, it’s incum­bent on the inno­va­tors to pro­vide a fault­less user expe­ri­ence and the high­est pos­si­ble reli­a­bil­i­ty, plus a direct line to tech sup­port and prefer­ably with voice com­mand capa­bil­i­ty in the device. 

But Con­ti­ni insists the accep­tance of fal­li­bil­i­ty on the customer’s part must be there too, as cre­ators can’t envi­sion every pos­si­ble sce­nario. “Just this morn­ing, a leaf got stuck in my robot vac­u­um and it was spin­ning around like an idiot,” she says.

When it comes to tak­ing the leap and entrust­ing more and increas­ing­ly crit­i­cal parts of con­sumers’ lives to smart tech­nol­o­gy, under­stand­ing that we are all on a jour­ney is key. There has to be a recog­ni­tion that, in many cas­es, the tech­nol­o­gy is far from per­fect – but that every step for­ward is a refine­ment.

“Rachel Bots­man is the lead­ing author­i­ty on trust, which she defines as ‘a com­fort­able rela­tion­ship with the unknown’,” Evans con­cludes. “As an insur­er, the con­sumer trusts that we’ll do the right thing. So, it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly about the tech­nol­o­gy, it’s about con­vey­ing that to the cus­tomer.”