How Trust in Companies Is Changing Rapidly

Rachel Botsman is a trust expert. She predicted the rise of the sharing economy and wrote two books about trust — Who Can You Trust and What’s Mine is Yours. She also has a podcast called Trust Issues.

So why are we talking about trust? As we’ve detailed, the energy system is changing fast. New distributed energy players are entering the space, customers are increasingly in control of their energy choices, and utilities must think differently about their relationships with customers in order to remain competitive. Trust is a big part of this shift.

“Regulation will not protect you ... so much of trust is tied to power ... you can have the most powerful lobbying groups, regulation, but it won’t protect you around behavioral changes. When the consumer says, I want this in my life and actually the old way didn’t really work for me. It was just money and power centralizing something... regulation will take time. But it will not protect you.”

Rachel calls trust the “currency” or the “social glue” of life and business. But we don’t necessarily think about it in that way.

“Companies and sectors are starting to realize that if you put money, profits, growth, everything tied to the transactional side of things, if you put those above, and ahead, and continually prioritize them over the currency of trust, you're going to run into problems and issues,” says Rachel.

In this episode, we’ll uncover how trust guides everything around us — and what that means for businesses that are facing change.