W
hen you see a customer come into your business staring at a smartphone, you might imagine he's checking social media to get the latest count of "likes" on a recent post. You would imagine this if you were optimistic and hopeful, or you might imagine that he's intending to make a purchase from an internet retailer but wanted to actually see, hold, and try out the product first - in your store! You provide the showroom, but the internet retailer gets the sale. You would imagine this if you were pessimistic or maybe just a guy who feels pushed out of the way by customers with smartphones who don't seem to want anything to do with you.
Yes, indeed! Times are tough for brick-and-mortar retailers.
Cindy Rippe from Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida feels your plight, and she is watching from the perspective of a scientist. She has conducted several studies on the subject, and her most recent effort examined the interaction between smartphone-equipped customers and salespeople. She wanted to know how the introduction of smartphones impacts in-store customer behavior and their interaction with sales staff.
Smartphone-equipped customers make assumptions about salespeople, and salespeople make assumptions about them. Customers imagine that sales staff care nothing about them and expect clerks to focus on pushing the sale. Salespeople imagine that smartphone-equipped customers have no intention of actually buying a product from them, so devoting effort to help them is a waste of time.
Ripe believes that salespeople could suspend their own assumptions about customers and simultaneously confound customers' assumptions about them. She believes adaptive selling techniques will do the job. To test her ideas, she created two fictional accounts of an encounter in a store between a sales clerk and smartphone-equipped customers who were actively searching the internet while in the store. One account described a clerk using adaptive selling techniques. The clerk asked probing questions exploring the customer's need for the product (how will you use this product?) and varied his affect to compliment the customer's needs. The second account described a clerk avoiding the use of adaptive selling techniques. This clerk was friendly and helpful, but that's about all.
Rippe tested her scenarios on 560 smartphone consumers, and she included questions that allowed her to make measurements of some important qualities of her shoppers. Two findings stand out from her work. First, increased searching on the internet while in the store led to customer feelings of increased control of the sales encounter. Enhanced feelings of control led to stronger intentions to actually purchase the product in the store. Second, the use of adaptive selling techniques by sales staff led to increases in customers' reliance on sales staff as experts in their fields, and this increase led to an improvement in customers' willingness to rely on the opinions and recommendations of sales staff.
Rippe's work leads her to two recommendations for brick-and-mortar retailers. First, she believes you should facilitate internet searching by customers in your store. Free wi-fi comes immediately to mind. She also believes sales staff should be search assistants for customers with suggestions for comparison Web sites, review sites, and alternative search terms. Being an expert on the search process for specific products can only enhance the impression that sales staff are experts and valuable resources for customers. She also believes that store owners should create a presence on the internet through websites and apps of their own that staff can refer to and suggest for download. She does caution, however, that you take this step carefully and not commit large resources to it.
Second, she believes sales staff should develop their adaptive selling skills. Smartphone-equipped consumers in her study responded well to attentive salespeople using these selling techniques. Remember, an app can't ask probing questions. It can't offer encouragement, and it can't offer an opinion that a particular choice is right for this customer, and there is no app that will tell you if an item of clothing you want to buy makes you look great.
Reference: Rippé, C.B., Weisfeld-Spolter, S., Yurova, Y., Dubinsky, A.J., & Hale, D. (2017). Under the sway of the mobile device during the in-store shopping experience. Psychology & Marketing. 34(7), 733-752.
Customer Psychology Findings, by James Larsen, Ph.D.
Surrender or Adapt
Researcher suggests adapting to technological realities.
Keywords: direct sales, smartphone
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