Businesses often try to earn customer trust through branding, reviews, and reputation. But a study of 2 million WeChat messages between an interior design firm and its customers highlights another factor that influences buyers: seeing how employees work behind the scenes.
When prospective clients witnessed internal conversations among employees coordinating projects, they perceived the company’s products and services as higher quality, trusted the firm more, and were more likely to move forward with purchases, according to research by Dennis Campbell, the Dwight P. Robinson Jr. Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
“You're getting a view into the inner workings of how people work together in a company, which then may give you more confidence in your willingness to sign a contract and more confidence in the quality you are likely to receive down the road,” explains Campbell.
The findings come at a time when technology is giving customers unprecedented access to a company’s inner workings. Emails, chat threads, and apps like Zoom and WhatsApp allow clients to increasingly see teams coordinating in real time—particularly in service industries such as consulting, banking, and tourism—and these glimpses can shape perceptions of quality and trust, Campbell says.
Whether managers realize it or not, customers are closely studying and judging their work culture. It's akin to how patrons rate a restaurant not just on food quality but on how well the hosts, wait staff, bartenders, and cooks work together to provide a top-notch experience.
“To our knowledge, nobody has really tested the effect of that visibility into the company's culture from a customer-trust perspective,” says Campbell. He coauthored the research, “The Signaling Value of Internal Employee Coordination,” with Wei Cai, assistant professor at Columbia Business School, and Jiehang Yu, a doctoral candidate at Columbia. The study was published in the December issue of the Journal of Accounting Research.
When customers view employee chatter
The researchers partnered with an unnamed firm in China that decorates new apartments and renovates old ones for customers. The study sample included 446 employees.
After a customer submits an inquiry to the firm, a service agent forms a WeChat group that includes the client and three randomly chosen employees: a designer and two service agents. Online chats are used to answer the client’s questions, offer preliminary design advice, and provide pricing and scheduling information. In addition to communicating with the customer, employee team members chat with one another—in full view of the client.
The goal is to convince the customer to visit a brick-and-mortar store and sign a contract. “A visit to the store indicates the customer’s trust in the organization and their intent to establish a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship,” the researchers write.
Inside 2 million customer chats
To study the impact of company culture on trust, the researchers accessed 2 million group chats involving 16,476 customers and accompanying proprietary data that provided a powerful view into the decorator’s inner workings.
The data, captured during most of 2020, included text message content, time stamps, and the sender’s role. The research team also gathered data on each customer, including the time the WeChat group was formed, the size and location of the home to be decorated, and ultimately whether the customer visited the store and signed the contract.
In the sample, customers had an average store visit rate of 28%, and nearly 3% of the total sample signed a contract.
Spurring more customers to sign contracts
While customers appreciated the politeness, promptness, and empathy of staff, employee responsiveness topped the list of factors that built trust and increased the odds of a deal.
Even more important than how quickly employee teams responded to customers’ questions and comments was how quickly employees responded to one another. “When you're seeing employees being very responsive to each other, that's a very easy signal for customers to observe,” says Campbell.
In fact, when the average reply time between employees was cut in half:
The customer’s visit probability increased by nearly 14%.
The customer’s chat-to-visit time decreased by half a day, lowering costs and shortening the operation cycle for the company.
The probability of signing the contract rose by 10%.
How to turn culture into customer trust
The research offers several practical ways for managers to build trust with customers, Campbell says.
Invest in culture
A strong culture pays dividends both internally and externally, so organizations should prioritize outstanding communication and strong employee engagement, especially when they’re in the company of customers.
Assign a team to communicate with customers
Since the presence of multiple staff on projects can be a signal of quality to customers, managers should encourage groups of employees to actively engage with customers when possible. For that matter, managers should also be visible to customers, rather than sitting in a back room waiting for problems to be brought to them.
Lean toward natural interactions
Scripted conversations reveal little to customers and can feel robotic, limiting their ability to understand how the organization actually operates.
The ultimate lesson is that internal culture is valuable to those outside the company, Campbell says.
“To us, the bigger deal here is that there are many settings where your culture matters and is externally visible in ways that can erode or build trust,” he says.
Illustration by HBSWK with photos from Adobe Stock.
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The Signaling Value of Internal Employee Coordination
Cai, Wei, Dennis Campbell, and Jiehang Yu. "The Signaling Value of Internal Employee Coordination." Journal of Accounting Research 63, no. 5 (December 2025): 1953–1993.
