Trust is a must-have for companies today. More than four out of five consumers won’t buy from a brand they don’t trust and will disengage if their trust is broken. On the upside, more than half of adult Gen Z survey respondents say they will pay a premium for products from brands they trust.

Customer trust, I believe, is a greater competitive advantage than being first to market—an advantage that carries over when a company introduces new products and services. This can benefit incumbents who have solid reputations earned over time and a willingness to extend their business models into new markets.

Many business leaders have a worrying blind spot, however: Nearly 90% of surveyed executives said customers have a high degree of trust in their companies, but only 30% of customers say they do. This “jarring gap” may cause companies to underestimate the need to focus on customer trust—but it’s essential if they are to thrive.

START WITH DATA PRIVACY AND PROTECTION

Enterprises intent on bolstering customers’ trust can start by making every effort to safeguard their personal data. Consumers believe this protection is extremely important—and they believe companies are falling short.

Also, failure can be costly financially and reputationally: Companies have routinely faced massive fines for failing to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) since it went into effect five years ago. In May, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined Meta $1.3 billion—the biggest GDPR penalty to date—for transferring user data from the E.U. to the U.S.

Instilling cyber trust may be a particularly potent way for companies to forge strong bonds with customers because they feel exposed, vulnerable, and powerless when it comes to protecting their online security. Their fear is not unfounded: Cybercrime is expected to surge from $8.4 trillion in 2022 to $24 trillion in 2027.

“For organizations to be truly successful,” the World Economic Forum says, “the perception of cybersecurity must shift from being a ‘check box’ activity to being a strategic tool that can further drive business objectives and build customer trust.”

EMBEDDED TRUST

Companies can embed trust in their customer relationships through accelerated adoption of new technologies to fight fraud and identity theft. This includes two approaches that are now gaining ground:

Zero trust architecture (ZTA): Organizations today extend their IT infrastructures into public cloud environments and deploy critical applications on mobile and IoT devices so they can offer more flexible and personalized services and deliver them faster. Unfortunately, this also makes them more vulnerable to cyber criminals who relentlessly probe their infrastructures for weaknesses. The increase in employees remotely accessing their companies’ tech environments has accelerated this exposure. Gartner, in fact, lists “attack surface expansion” as a top security risk facing enterprises.

ZTA combats this threat by ensuring that a system breach on the perimeter of an organization’s IT infrastructure—at a web or edge node, for example—is restricted to that single system and cannot penetrate further into the organization’s environment. It also allows IT staff to log and monitor access, so breaches are rapidly identified, isolated, and assessed.

ZTA is not yet widely deployed across most enterprises, but it will become the default security architecture of the hybrid-cloud era as enterprises strive to stay ahead of cybersecurity threats. Vendors such as Microsoft and Amazon provide ZTA features in their cloud environments today, and the global zero trust security market is expected to grow from $24 billion in 2021 to $126 billion by 2031.

Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs): The digital economy generates vast amounts of personal data every day—from our social media interactions, use of phone apps, online transactions, content streaming, browsing histories, and other digital activity. All that personal information is vulnerable to cyberattack, and customers expect companies to protect it. At the same time, they want optimal, hyper-personalized consumer experiences that require companies to access and analyze that data.

This leaves businesses constrained, looking for ways to deliver personalized experiences and put personal data to use without putting it at risk.

PETs are a potential solution. They let organizations analyze and extract insights from sensitive datasets without revealing the nature or details of the data itself, even to the analysts. In this way, PETs advance the principles of data privacy by design—protecting the underlying data and the individuals and businesses it represents while safely using it to design and enhance engaging products, services, and experiences. Gartner predicts 60% of large enterprises will use at least one PET technique by 2025.

Complying with data privacy regulations is the bare minimum for companies today—it’s not enough to earn the confidence of consumers. Those that go further by adopting ZTA, PETs, and other emerging technologies can embed trust that will cement customer relationships for the long haul and set them apart from their competitors.