One year in: Lessons from launching our public trust center

In May of 2024, we launched a public-facing trust center(opens in a new tab) for our company — a central, self-service hub for all things related to our security posture.

The thesis of our experiment was simple: If we created a transparent and accessible place for customers to review our compliance documents and get answers to their security questions, we could proactively streamline the sales process by providing our security assurances up front so that security teams can review relevant documents with ease and see what makes Nutrient’s security posture best in class in our product space.

A little more than a year later, the results of our trust center experiment speak for themselves. In this post, I’d like to discuss everything we’ve learned over the last year of having a public-facing trust center.

Why we launched a trust center

As our customer base grew, so too did the volume of security-related requests. From requests for compliance documentation to long-form security questionnaires, our Security and Sales teams were spending a significant amount of time just answering repeat questions or doing other administrative work to fulfill customer security requests.

Worse, these requests often came in ad hoc, creating backlogs and delays during a critical phase of the sales cycle. Complexity and one-offs are the eternal enemy of efficient business processes, and we realized we had an immense opportunity here to simplify. We could make this whole process so much easier for everyone involved if we just made our compliance documentation more readily available in one place for our prospects and customers.

What our trust center does

Our trust center now serves as the front door for all customer-facing security content. Through the portal, customers can:

• Access compliance documentation (SOC 2 reports, penetration tests, company policies, etc.)
• View frequently asked questions and their answers
• Ask and get immediate answers to questions based on our available security documents

Furthermore, on the backend, we make use of our trust center to process the intake of security questionnaires from significant enterprise customers who require these kinds of lengthy documents as part of their procurement process. This is incredibly useful for two big reasons:

• We can more effectively route incoming questions to the correct internal experts so that the person best suited to answer any given question is looped in immediately instead of us having to play Slack hot potato.
• We can track questions we’ve already answered so that we can both reuse them as part of our knowledge base in the future, as well as track what kinds of questions get asked most frequently.

How it’s helped our customers

From day one, we noticed several key benefits for our customers:

• Self-service — Customers can now peruse our library of documents and self-serve documents they need, reducing delays and back-and-forth emails for questions that are already answered in our relevant security documents.
• Data-driven security improvement — By tracking which documents and questions customers care about most, we’ve been able to more efficiently prioritize improvements to our security posture based on what the data directly shows us matters most to our customers.
• Efficient questionnaire handling — Our trust center speeds up the often-lengthy questionnaire form process for large enterprise customers by streamlining intake and routing, saving time for both sides.
• Improved response quality — Routing questions to the right people, as well as maintaining a knowledge base of answers to previous questions, leads to better, faster answers.

What the data told us

We believe in data-driven self-improvement as part of our core values, so I’ll switch gears and highlight some of the numbers here. Regardless of how convincingly I can throw words together and speak to the logical merits of trust center transparency, the accompanying data should speak for itself:

• We launched our public trust center in early May 2024. Forty-nine percent of all security questionnaires in 2024 came in before the trust center launched. This means that half of our questionnaires in 2024 came in less than halfway through the year.
• After launching our trust center, we saw a 56 percent decrease in the number of incoming questionnaires compared to the number of questionnaires we received in 2023.
• Seventy-five percent of customers who sent us questionnaires also accessed our SOC 2 report, showing a clear overlap between compliance interest and deeper security scrutiny.

To tie this up with one more important detail, we also found that customers with a high interest in our security program who ask lots of questions are generally larger organizations with much more expansive license purchases.

And this makes intuitive sense: If you’re paying for a much larger contract, you’re going to give the purchase that much more scrutiny from all angles, including security.

By serving a public trust center, we not only save time on our end, but we’re also able to more effectively cater to the needs of an incredibly important segment of our customers.

Final thoughts

Launching our trust center wasn’t just about reducing internal workload (although it definitely helped there). It was about giving our customers what they needed: frictionless access to information and confidence in our security practices, all packaged in a responsive and transparent experience.

Maintaining a clearly visible and easily accessible portal for security information helps ensure we make a strong and trustworthy first impression. For many customers trialing a software product, the first thing their security or vendor review team does is navigate to the vendor website and look for a page about security and compliance information. It’s important for us to have this information readily available so that even newcomers to our website who haven’t heard of us before can immediately see that a strong security posture is one of the factors that makes us an industry leader in our product space.

One year into the trust center experiment, we’ve received nothing but resounding positivity from both our customers and our team members across the company. For now, we can safely say that the trust center is here to stay.

If you’re interested in learning more about our compliance posture, feel free to check out our trust center yourself at trust.nutrient.io(opens in a new tab).