Trust as a Leadership Responsibility: The Executive Team’s Role in Loyalty Work

When everyone partly owns the customer, no one fully does

Many companies today have multiple functions working with the customer: marketing, data, sales, service, digital, product and often several more. In isolation, that makes sense. But together, it creates a risk.

Namely that no one truly owns the overall relationship.

McKinsey points precisely to this in its work on C-suite alignment around the customer. In its 2025 analysis, McKinsey highlights that companies with one integrated customer-oriented executive role in top management see significantly stronger growth, and that top teams have become larger and more fragmented over time. That makes it harder to keep the customer perspective united if no one takes clear ownership.

This is not just an internal governance issue. It quickly becomes a customer issue.

When one function optimises for efficiency, another for conversion, a third for compliance and a fourth for short-term profit, there is a real risk that no one is optimising for the long-term strength of the relationship. And that is exactly where trust can begin to erode.

Trust is determined by the company’s real priorities

Customers rarely lose trust because of a single campaign. They lose trust when the company’s choices, taken together, feel unclear, unfair or inconsistent.

It may be pricing that feels opportunistic. It may be processes designed more for internal efficiency than for customer understanding. It may be service that does not match the promise in communication. Or data practices that feel smarter for the company than they are valuable for the customer.

In every case, the point is the same: trust is not decided in the message alone. It is decided in the interaction between messaging, operations, processes and priorities.

That is why trust is not just a marketing issue. It is a leadership issue.

The executive team’s biggest mistake is reducing loyalty to a programme

It is tempting to make loyalty operational through something tangible: a programme, a platform, a new flow or a set of incentives. That is not wrong. But it becomes insufficient when leadership ignores the more fundamental questions:

• Is our business model experienced as fair?
• Is the way we treat customers consistent?
• Do customers understand how we use data and make decisions?
• Does our internal governance reward behaviour that strengthens or weakens the relationship?

If these questions are not addressed, the company risks building an impressive loyalty layer on top of a relationship that is actually weak.

Adobe points to loyalty as a growth driver because loyal customers buy more often, spend more and contribute to more predictable performance. But that is only possible if the relationship is robust enough to carry that value over time.

Trust has to be measured — otherwise it quickly becomes intuition

HBR’s point is simple and important: if trust matters so much, why is it so rarely measured properly? Many leadership teams speak of trust as essential, but still govern primarily through financial measures, activity measures and classic CX metrics.

That does not necessarily mean companies need to invent one perfect trust score. But it does mean trust should be linked to a set of indicators leadership can actually use:

• perceived fairness
• transparency in key decisions
• consistency across touchpoints
• willingness to share data
• repeat purchase, retention and recommendation

When trust is measured alongside actual behaviour, it also becomes harder to ignore.

The real leadership question is not whether trust matters

That question has already been answered.

The real question is whether the executive team is willing to prioritise trust even when it costs something in the short term. Because that is where the test lies.

An insurance company may say peace of mind is central. But if claims handling is designed so tightly that the customer experiences resistance at the most important moment, the brand promise becomes hollow. A bank may talk about simplicity, but if its terms are unclear or its advice varies too much, simplicity gains no real credibility. A B2B company may have long contracts and deep integrations, but if the customer does not experience fairness and a solution-oriented mindset, the relationship is more fragile than it appears.

In other words, trust is not tested when everything runs smoothly. It is tested when the relationship comes under pressure.

Three questions every executive team should ask itself

If loyalty is to be more than a tactical ambition, the executive team should be able to answer three questions clearly:

Who owns the customer perspective across the business?
Not in theory, but in practice.

How do we know where trust is being strengthened or weakened?
Not only whether customers are satisfied, but why the relationship is developing the way it is.

Which decisions improve short-term economics but weaken the relationship in the long term?
This is often where the most important leadership choices sit.

When these questions are taken seriously, loyalty work shifts. From campaigns to governance. From tactics to leadership. From activity to real business development.

Loyalty starts in leadership

Customers do not become loyal because a company wants them to. They become loyal when, over time, the company behaves in a way that makes the relationship worth staying in.

That is what makes trust a basic premise in loyalty work. And that is what makes trust a leadership responsibility.