Customer greeting in offline retail stores: A literature review and a case study

Abstract

Artikkel 1. Abstract The retail industry is confronted with big challenges due to technical innovation, digitalization and online shops. This can be seen in the high number of stores closing across the whole industry. If Brick and Mortar retailers want to succeed in the competition with online stores, they need to rely on their unique characteristics and integrate in-store technologies. One major advantage of offline retailers is the personal service, which increases the shopping morale of customers. An important part of the customer service experience is the personal customer greeting. Retail management are training their employees to professionalize and improve in this regard. This work collects and discusses literature regarding the effect of customer greeting and the future role of salespeople. Behavior scientific methods shed light on ways performance can be improved. Moreover, it reports on studies discussing the utility and feasibility of new technologies in the offline retail industry, and how technology can analyze customer and salespeople’s behavior, and improve the customer service experience. The focus lies on recent studies within the years 2010 to 2019. In total six articles are focusing on greeting among the 149 screened articles within the field of offline retailing. The reviewed literature indicates that customer greeting can increase sales and that service performance can be improved with interventions. Moreover, following the reviewed literature, the role of salespeople is changing from performing all in-store productivity tasks to provide personal, interactive service and assistance to customers which involves new technology, internet and social media.

Artikkel 2. This is a case study of a consultant firm named MAZE Feedback and one of their customers, which was a fashion retail organization. MAZE is located in Norway, UK, Denmark and Sweden, and offers various businesses technology tools and performance interventions. In this study the focus will be to offer a behavior scientific account of the training intervention and implementation of a feedback software within the fashion retail organization. The goal of the intervention was to improve customer service performance of salespeople, greeting of customers. Responses to customer satisfaction survey was provided by MAZE and regression and modeling have been applied to provide some descriptive measures of customer greeting across physical retail store locations. Perceived strengths and weaknesses of the reported methods used by MAZE will be measured against Organizational Behavior Management literature.