Customer query handling in sales interactions

Sunil Singh (), Detelina Marinova (), Jagdip Singh () and Kenneth R. Evans ()
Additional contact information
Sunil Singh: University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Detelina Marinova: University of Missouri-Columbia
Jagdip Singh: Case Western Reserve University
Kenneth R. Evans: Lamar University

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 2018, vol. 46, issue 5, No 4, 837-856

Abstract: Abstract Using a novel approach with video-recordings of sales interactions, this study focuses on a dynamic analysis of salesperson effectiveness in handling customer queries. We conceptualize salesperson behaviors, namely, resolving, relating, and emoting, as separate elements of customer query handling and empirically identify the distinct verbal and nonverbal cues that salespeople use to display these behaviors during sales interactions. We draw from compensation effects in social cognition theory to propose that customers’ perceptions of a salesperson’s effectiveness are prone to trade-offs between competence (resolving behaviors) and warmth (relating and emoting behaviors). Results, robust to endogeneity corrections, support the proposed tradeoffs such that the effectiveness of salesperson’s resolving behavior is significantly curtailed, even neutralized, by the salesperson’s relating and emoting behaviors. We situate these counterintuitive results within the extant theory and research on sales interactions, and outline implications for practice.

Keywords: Customer query handling; Customer interest; Salesperson behaviors; Linguistic cues; Dynamic effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11747-017-0569-y

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