| 1. Information quality | 1. Participation |
| Participants discussed how complexity meant that they could not understand wholesale prices, energy bills and tariff structures, contributing to an overall lack of transparency and adding to distrust (Becker et al., 2019) | E.g. “affording them (consumers) the opportunity to actively participate in their electricity supplier’s sustainability efforts can improve the trust between supplier and customer” (Utz et al., 2023) |
| Poor communication and insufficient verifiability were the root cause of customer scepticism (Utz et al., 2023) | Allowing impacted citizens and organisations to have a say in decision-making was found to increase consumer trust (Becker et al., 2019) |
| 2. Equity | 2. Values |
| The interviews suggest that much of participants’ distrust and resentment stems from feelings that utilities have an unfair monopoly advantage over consumers, which they use in a self-interested way (Horne et al., 2022) | E.g. “The third trust dimension, moral values, focused on social commitment and the compliance with values” (Offerman-van Heek et al., 2018) |
| Some argued however that the public was already paying disproportionately because, in the end, all means of paying come from the public in the form of taxes or energy bills. This may be considered one source of distrust, because members of the public felt they were fulfilling their responsibility while institutional actors were not (Becker et al., 2019) | “As a result, the supplier and its customers have a common goal, which is an essential dimension in the creation of cognition-based trust” (Utz et al, 2023) |
| 3. Structures and power | 3. Autonomy |
| The distrust was based on a fundamental disagreement with the underlying motives and resultant organising structure (Becker et al., 2019) | Loyalty programs can improve customer trust by increasing their agency (Utz et al., 2023) |
| Distrust was reflected in participants’ concerns about market power (Horne et al., 2021) | “Customer’s trust was enhanced by the service provider’s … and customisation” (Chinomona and Sandada, 2014) |