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Luxury companies have expanded globally, but little attention is given to the difficulties associated with expansion to culturally different countries, especially when focusing on training salespeople in rapport-building behaviors. To address this discussion, we answer these research questions: (1) Does the luxury fashion brand country of origin affect the rapport-building strategies of salespeople?; (2) How do luxury fashion employees classify customers from collectivistic cultures with emerging economies, such as that in Brazil?; and (3) What are the rapport-building strategies used by these salespeople for each of these luxury fashion customer segments?

The authors conducted in-depth interviews with salespeople, managers and team supervisors from four global luxury retailers from Britain, France and Italy that operate in Brazil. In total, the authors interviewed 20 employees with an average of greater than 7 years of experience in luxury sales. The authors based their analysis on a theoretically generated coding guide and content analysis theories.

When expanding to culturally different countries, retail companies should adopt glocal strategies, especially when luxury is involved and when customers demand exclusive attention from companies. Additionally, the authors suggest that the effectiveness of rapport building strategies is culturally dependent and should be adapted to the microlevel, especially for continental countries that are culturally diverse.

This is employee-view research, with no inputs from customers or corporate managers. Luxury fashion brand stores did not grant permission for official research within their employees nor the observation of their customers during in-store interactions. Researchers interviewed employees as individual professionals, and their identities will remain anonymous.

When expanding to culturally different countries, luxury retailers should give special attention to the adaption of sales strategies, training and sales guidelines.

This study focuses on customer-employee rapport from the company's perspective.

Consequent upon the intense competitive nature of today's business environment, service businesses are seeking for the most creative but effective means of attracting and retaining customers. One of the ways is to build quality relationship via interpersonal relationship with customers. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate two ways of building interpersonal relationship with customers – respect and rapport, and their impact on overall customer perceived relationship quality, as well as the role of context/environment.

This preliminary study reports on empirical results from a survey of customers of dental clinics in Malaysia. Data from a questionnaire survey of 563 respondents were analysed using factor analysis, Pearson correlation and hierarchical multiple regression analysis. The authors estimated the direct effect of respect and rapport on relationship quality as well as the moderating effect of context (cosmopolitan vs traditional milieu).

The results show that both rapport and respect are important in building quality relationship with customers. Environment/context has a direct effect on relationship quality. Context moderates the relationship between rapport and relationship quality but does not moderate the relationship between respect and relationship quality.

This research is of practical use to service companies (especially healthcare service providers) interested in developing effective strategies for building quality relationship with customers. Building good rapport and respecting customers are useful relational strategies to pursue.

The effect of rapport and respect on relationship quality in the Asian context has not been studied before. The paper sheds light on the overlooked dimensions of respect and service sector (small healthcare businesses) and also highlights the contextual implications of the findings.

This research seeks to test a model examining the antecedents and outcomes of interpersonal rapport in a professional service context. The four antecedents examined are familiarity, mutual self‐disclosure, extras, and common grounding, and the outcomes examined are trust, satisfaction, and word‐of‐mouth communication.

The study employs a survey methodology to obtain the opinions of 121 dental patients regarding their relationships with dental professionals. The hypothesized relationships in the model were tested using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The research findings indicated that all four antecedents were positively related to rapport. Rapport was also found to be related to customer satisfaction and word‐of‐mouth communication, but rapport was not found to be related to trust. Post hoc analysis suggests that rapport appears to be related to trust early in relationships, then becomes less important, but re‐emerges as a driver of trust in very mature relationships.

Since rapport appears to be important to generating word‐of‐mouth, managers should foster and reward rapport‐building behavior.

The study empirically verified four antecedents of interpersonal rapport in services, and supports the role of rapport as an important mediating variable in relationship development. The research also supported prior findings on the unique contribution of rapport to positive word‐of‐mouth communication.

This study draws on the author's experiences building rapport through online chat for data collection for the author's doctoral dissertation. The author contacted ten Korean women via online chat to recruit and faced the most challenging situation; building rapport. As the Millennial generation is known as being tech-savvy or digital natives, the author actively used emoticons (pictorial representations of facial expressions using characters) with potential interviewees and completed ten interviews. Therefore, this paper offers a new qualitative interviewing method in feminist research.

The paper briefly reviews the works of literature on interviewing women on sensitive topics and building rapport before the interview. Then, the author introduced using emoticons to create rapport during the data collection process and how a non-traditional approach positively impacts the interviewer and interviewee before, during and even after the interview.

Women participants' responses and behaviors differed after building a rapport through an online chat. They were willing to share their personal stories and memories with the interviewer even though the interviewer did not ask.

This study provides a stepping stone for developing an account of the new qualitative methodological approach, specifically feminist qualitative research.

Few studies have described how qualitative researchers create a rapport in virtual space, specifically using emoticons. Also, this study suggests a new methodological approach since nonverbal communication in online chat is inevitable when interviewing people in qualitative research.

This study aims to capture the mediation role of customer–frontline employee rapport on customer satisfaction and affective, calculative and normative commitment by using three alternative models. It also verifies the moderation effect of relationship age on the rapport-satisfaction link in each alternative model.

The survey data collected from bank customers were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) with the partial least square (PLS) method.

Results confirmed rapport as a significant mediator between satisfaction and each of the three types of commitment. Relationship age significantly moderates the links between rapport to affective and normative commitment but not to calculative commitment.

Additional findings from “importance–performance analysis” suggest that satisfaction is more import to customers than rapport for developing commitment, so further investigations can reveal the underlying reasons. Also, complementary mediation shows one or more missing mediators, which calls for future research.

Managers need to use rapport strategically with customers in different relationship ages to build different types of commitment. Specific tactics to build rapport and possible long run implications for developing affective, calculative and normative commitment have been discussed in the “note to practitioner” section.

Using “broaden-and-build” theory, the study extends the literature by confirming the mediation influence of rapport on satisfaction and three types of commitment relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of calculative, affective and normative commitment on bank employee-customer rapport and customer satisfaction. The mediating effect of rapport between each of the three types of commitment and customer satisfaction is also examined.

Structural equation modelling by Partial Least Square method is used for analysing the data on 212 bank customers in Bangladesh.

Results indicate that affective and normative commitment of customers has strong influence in developing rapport, whereas the impact of customers’ calculative commitment on rapport was found to be non-significant. The study also found that rapport has a complementary mediation effect between the three types of commitment and customer satisfaction.

While providing training to front line employees, bank management should make them aware that not all customers may have the same level of positive attitude or cooperation for the rapport-building procedure. Employees should understand that different customers will respond differently to their efforts for building rapport due to their pre-existing commitment levels towards banks. Bank management should acknowledge that customers’ current level of commitment may be further strengthened or weakened by successful or unsuccessful rapport building with banks’ employees and thereby re-evaluate their satisfaction level with the bank.

The study contributes to the relationship literature by exploring the mediating role of rapport between commitment and customer satisfaction, and by considering the influence of normative commitment on customer-employee rapport in financial services.

Online innovation communities are central for many organizations seeking to advance their innovation portfolio. While these communities rely on consumers to collaborate in the innovation process, it remains unclear what drives these consumers to perform value co-creation activities and what value dimensions they derive as a result. This paper aims to advance the understanding of value co-creation in the online collaborative innovation context. Specifically, it aims to examine social and individual factors driving such activities, and the value derived from the perspective of the member.

A self-administered online questionnaire was used to collect data from collaborative innovation community members yielding 309 complete responses. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data, using variance-based structural equation modelling with partial least squares path modelling in SmartPLS.

Results confirm that distinct social and individual factors facilitate individual value co-creation activities, including the provision of feedback, helping, rapport building and information sharing. Furthermore, the research confirms the mediating role of learning on these relationships.

This study contributes to the micro-foundation movement in marketing by undertaking an independent examination of value co-creation activities and their nomological network.

A shift in the mindset of managing for collaborative innovation is required, from a focus on collaborative product development to the management of an online community where members derive value from their co-creation activities.

This research is the first to offer insight into important individual and social pre-conditions and subsequent value outcomes of four common value co-creation activities. It informs practice about how to facilitate value co-creation activities and contribute to the co-creation of value for online innovation community members.

This paper explores the importance of building trust and rapport with participants using gatekeepers and insider-outsider dynamics in accessing vulnerable research participants in the Global South.

This paper draws data from a qualitative case study conducted in Sattola slum in Dhaka.

Findings suggest that access to participants can be gained through building rapport and trust with participants. A trusting relationship further helps the researcher to explore the processes of social exclusion experienced by the participants.

Few studies is published on female researchers building trust with vulnerable research participants negotiating gatekeepers and their subjectivity in the field. The paper contributes original insights into this from fieldwork carried out by a middle-class female researcher in Dhaka. It raises important issues in securing the trust of participants when they are part of disadvantaged, exploited or generally vulnerable populations.

The purpose of this paper is to report antecedent roles of competence, contractual and goodwill trust on rapport and satisfaction in banking services in a developing country context. The study also identifies the mediating influence of these three types of trust between rapport and customer satisfaction.

Data collected from a sample of 212 bank customers were analysed using AMOS-based structural equation modelling.

While all three types of trust have significant impact on satisfaction, only competence and goodwill trust positively influenced rapport. Results also demonstrate that competence and goodwill trust had complementary mediation impacts in the rapport-satisfaction context; however, mediation influence of contractual trust was not significant. Finally, influence of rapport was found to be positive towards satisfaction.

Management should focus on building goodwill and competence trust with bank customers. Bank managers should hire and train employees who are friendly in terms of customer care and are able to develop rapport with customers to increase the latter's satisfaction.

The paper tested the influence of competence, contractual and goodwill trust on rapport and satisfaction and verified the mediation impact of trust between rapport and satisfaction.

Rapport between service employees and customers has been suggested to be an important determinant of customer relationship management, yet existing marketing literature still lacks a sufficient understanding of how service employees’ nonverbal communication affects customer-employee rapport development in service encounters. The purpose of this paper is to fill this research gap by proposing and testing a model that explores how service employees’ nonverbal communication (employee affective delivery and behavioral mimicry) influences customer positive emotions and customer-employee rapport. The mediating role of customer positive emotions and the moderating role of store atmosphere in the process of customer-employee rapport development were also assessed.

Using an observational methodology in conjunction with a customer survey, multi-source survey data collected from 303 customer-employee pairs in the apparel retailing industry was examined through structural equation modeling and regression analysis.

Results showed that employee nonverbal communication positively influenced customer positive emotions and customer-employee rapport. The partial mediating role of customer positive emotions and the moderating role of store atmosphere in the process of rapport development were also confirmed.

Service firms should train and motivate employees to use nonverbal communication to develop and strengthen customer-employee rapport. The importance of customer positive emotions in the service process should be addressed in the customer-employee rapport development process. Moreover, service managers should also allocate firm resources to create a well-designed store atmosphere for target customers.

This research represents one of the earliest studies to explore and empirically test the influence of employee nonverbal communication on customer-employee rapport development in service encounters. The partial mediating role of customer positive emotions and the moderating role of store atmosphere on the relationship between employee nonverbal communication and customer-employee rapport were also proposed and confirmed.