Can trust be measured? Daryl Mather thinks so.

Related to loyalty, but not to a loyalty program, per se, Daryl Mather, Senior Reliability Consultant at Meridium wrote an interesting post about measuring trust. The article seems to target professional consultants, however the concepts apply to all types of, well, "reputation marketing" for lack of a better term.

What I love about the article is that it actually talks about REAL NUMBERS. And for me, REAL NUMBERS equates to accountability.

Mather suggests that trust can be measured in the following ways:
- % of business from repeat clients (Mather says 30% of your work should come from repeat customers)
- % of business from both passive referrals and auto-referrals, where passive referrals come from clients who refer you to others, and auto-referrals are the result of your blog, press about you, etc.
- quote strike rate - ie, how many quotes are accepted vs the number sent out

These are really simple metrics that could be used for many purposes. Substitute "quotes" for "personalized letter and brochure" and you have yourself a recipe for direct mail metrics, for example. Mather's post focuses on a client-consultant trust relationship, but this could easily be translated into a consumer-brand relationship. Essentially using Mather's metrics as a foundation, you could build a scorecard for any type of business trust relationship.