BUILDING TRUST IN KEY CUSTOMER - SUPPLIER RELATIONSHIPS

SUMMARY Successful customers and suppliers share a commitment to achieving high performance, yet their interdependency requires a level of trust that is often not obtained. This is frequently because a working understanding of trust is lacking, and therefore, the question of how to build and maintain trust cannot be fully addressed. Our approach to building trusting relationships in the customer-supplier field is built upon our combined industrial experiences, action research and a review of the literature on trust relating to customers and suppliers. Our approach and process for building trust has a solid foundation, yet is evolving as we continue to test and validate through action research. Before business partners undertake joint trust-building initiatives, we suggest both parties gain a strong understanding of several important trust concepts, including: the meaning of trust, the notion of “optimal trust”, trust-readiness and an approach to assess trust-readiness. This paper describes these concepts, as well as other key foundational building blocks to optimize trust in key customer-supplier relationships.