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Drawing on the philosophy of retail service quality, this study aims to empirically investigate how salespeople’s personal interaction affects customers’ positive word-of-mouth (WOM) intention through the lens of affective customer experience and consumers’ cross-cultural attitudes toward domestic or foreign products.

The hypothesis was tested with a two-step structural equation model using survey data obtained from 529 shopping center customers in China.

The positive impact of salespeople’s personal interaction on customers’ positive WOM intention is fully mediated by affective customer experience. In addition, consumer ethnocentrism strengthens the positive impact of salespeople’s personal interaction on affective customer experience, whereas this study fails to find the moderating effect of foreign product affinity.

To increase customers’ positive WOM intention, store managers need to encourage their frontline sales personnel to personally interact with customers to support customers’ problem-solving. Also, frontline salespeople should pay more attention to consumers’ cross-cultural attitudes such as consumer ethnocentrism when interacting with their customers.

By linking affective customer experience and consumers’ cross-cultural attitudes of ethnocentrism and affinity toward domestic or foreign products, this study further extends the knowledge of retail service quality on the relationship between salespeople’s personal interaction and customers’ positive WOM intention.

The concept of emotional labor refers to the management of emotions in interaction with customers. This study aims to suggest an integrative definition of emotional labor. It develops a conceptual framework that helps organize and synthesize key insights from the literature, in an interactional and multi-level perspective.

This integrated framework consists in a mapping of key research themes resulting from a systematic literature review, which includes research in sales and marketing. As critical affective processes in sales have not been studied sufficiently, both in business-to-business and business-to-customer selling, this review also incorporates works in other research fields.

Sales representatives’ emotional labor must be considered as a bi-directional interaction with the customer in a multi-level perspective. Moreover, emotional labor has rather negative consequences for the salesperson (e.g. burnout and job stress), but may have positive sales and customer outcomes. Findings suggest that the expression of genuine emotions should be used during sales interactions. In addition, organizations should prevent customers’ negative behaviors (e.g. mistreatment).

Emotional labor key practical implications with regard to several management functions such as the recruitment, performance management and training (Ashkanasy and Daus, 2002) of the sales representatives.

Research on emotional labor in a sales ecosystem is scarce. It has largely covered service industry employees in contact with customers, but has not paid enough attention to sales representatives (Mikeska et al., 2015). The proposed integrated framework concerning emotional labor focuses on the bi-directional interaction between the sales representatives and their customers.

This paper aims to examine how modern, digital era customers in a business-to-consumer (B2C) setting prioritize salesperson-customer orientation attributes when evaluating their expectations regarding interactions with salespeople, as well as their impact on positive and negative word-of-mouth. In addition, the research further investigates which negative salesperson attributes have an impact on overall customer experience and satisfaction.

Role theory and expectancy-disconfirmation theory form the theoretical foundation for two mixed-method studies. Study 1 is an exploratory content analysis of online consumer reviews and social media word-of-mouth related to consumer experiences with salespeople. Study 2 is a three-round Delphi study investigating which salesperson orientation attributes are most important to the customer in B2C interactions.

The results uncover which salesperson customer orientation attributes are essential for modern consumers and how they differ as a function of context (retail, direct-selling and follow-up) and how they contribute to the generation of digital word-of-mouth.

This paper expands B2C sales interaction literature by exploring the need for differing sales attributes based on the differential function of the shopping environment.

Even though there has been anecdotal evidence regarding the use of ingratiation techniques in retail salesperson-shopper interactions, surprisingly, there has been limited research on the nature of these ingratiatory techniques and their impact on consumers’ perceptions and attitudes. The research reported here was conducted to determine the extent to which different ingratiation techniques that have been identified as techniques used in non-retailing domains are also used by retail salespersons in salesperson-shopper interactions. In addition, it sought to assess whether there are additional ingratiation techniques used by retail salespersons in salesperson-shopper interactions that have not been identified in existing ingratiation literature. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Two studies, drawing on research on ingratiation in other domains, were conducted in pursuit of realising the purpose. Study 1 was a survey involving a sample of 282 participants, which yielded 267 useable critical incident reports and 283 discrete examples of ingratiatory behaviours. Participants responded to various questions including a critical incident question. Cross-tabulations were, for the main part, used in assessing responses. A second survey involving 158 participants was undertaken as a verification study. This Study 2 yielded 144 useable responses.

Based on a critical incident technique (CIT), other enhancement: compliment and praise was the ingratiation technique most frequently cited by participants in the first sample, with product-customer enhancement being second and favour-rendering third. The Study 2 confirmed other enhancement: compliment and praise and product-customer enhancement as the top two techniques. Four new categories of ingratiatory behaviours emerged in retail salesperson-shopper interactions, and many of the ingratiatory behaviours previously identified in non-retailing contexts also exist in this retailing context.

Both samples are US samples, and the method used was the CIT. Though the US samples are appropriate for this study, the study could be extended to other groups and across cultures, to see whether cultural differences in the use of, and consumer responses to, ingratiation techniques exist. The study also did not look at the retail salespeople’s perspectives regarding the use of these techniques. Hence further research should address dyadic interpretations of a single ingratiatory encounter; and efforts should also be made to assess how consumers respond to ingratiation in retailing.

The studies result in a classification of the influence techniques used most often in retail settings in the USA. Retailers should be aware that customers may, therefore, expect certain kinds of influence tactics and may not respond in the same way when there is a departure from a “customary” influence tactic.

Not much research has explored the different kinds of ingratiation techniques used in retail contexts; nor has the stream of research sought to categorise them.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how social loneliness, emotional loneliness and social isolation relate to Indian consumers’ enjoyment of social interaction with an in-store salesperson.

Over 300 Indian respondents are surveyed about personal disposition, shopping experiences and other factors. The research model and hypotheses are evaluated utilizing partial least squares structural equation modeling.

As posited, Indian consumers dealing with loneliness and social isolation tend to enjoy in-store shopping experiences involving personal interactions with salespersons. Further, salespersons’ adaptive selling relates positively to consumers’ predisposition to comply with salesperson input and three outcomes (i.e. trust in salesperson, purchase intention and retail patronage).

This study fills a void in current marketing and retailing literature, providing one of the first known empirical investigations of consumers’ experiences with loneliness and social isolation. Overall, the study shows that store-based retailers within culturally collectivistic emerging markets can capitalize on their unique ability to attract and retain shoppers through in-store salesperson interactions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate selling actors in multi-actor sales ecosystems. When selling actors start taking over tasks that were formerly performed by salespeople, the distribution of tasks, allocation of responsibilities and finally the role of the salespeople changes. However, little is known about salespersons’ perceptions of selling actors’ identities and participation behavior in multi-actor sales ecosystems.

The authors conducted a World Café, a new qualitative method to the field of sales research, to obtain first data on selling actor identities in multi-actor sales ecosystems. Salespeople, who had the chance to observe and interact with more than 98,000 selling actors, disclosed their perceptions of selling actors’ participation behavior in a multi-actor sales ecosystem. Four different data sources were analyzed using qualitative content analysis to develop a comprehensive understanding of the topic and to test validity through the convergence of information from different sources.

Using identity theory, a salesperson–selling actor relationship/behavior typology for multi-actor sales ecosystems was developed. Eight different selling actor identities were identified: avoider, observer, receptive actor, prepper, expecter, savvy actor, challenger and coworker.

The typology provides researchers and managers with a tool to better understand and evaluate sales ecosystems. This knowledge can be used as a starting point for the reassessment of the knowledge, skills and abilities necessary for salespeople in multi-actor sales ecosystems and to improve their training and coaching. The firsthand experiences reported by the participants of the World Café enable salespeople to identify different selling actors faster and prepare fitting approaches for all selling actor identities.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how salesperson’s emotional intelligence (EI) influences salesperson behaviors (i.e. emotional labor strategies) and the influence these behavioral strategies have on customer’s outcomes.

The study develops a conceptual model using past literature and tests hypotheses using a salesperson-prospective customer dyadic sample. To participate in the study, 224 salespeople and their potential customers were recruited from three different companies.

Results reveal the importance of conceptualizing the dimensionality of a salesperson’s EI ability, as different dimensions impact customer outcomes differently. Additionally, the importance of salesperson’s authentic emotional labor strategies is highlighted.

EI is a foundation for successful selling in a business-to-business environment, but it is not a silver bullet. Sales managers and recruiters should use assessment tools to evaluate sales recruit’s EI, but it is also critical to train salespeople to engage in deep acting, creating authentic emotions in the buyer-seller relationship.

Using a dyadic sample, this study suggests that the dimensions of EI and emotional labor strategies influence customer’s perception of salesperson’s trustworthiness and propensity to continue the relationship with the salesperson differently. Specifically, not all dimensions of salesperson’s EI is found to be positive, and only salesperson’s authentic (deep) emotional strategies are found to influence customer outcomes positively.

This paper aims to focus on how salespeople use emotions to build connections and facilitate value proposition co-creation (VPCC) in B2B complex services sales.

This paper uses video recordings of authentic B2B sales meetings in a two-part qualitative study.

This paper proposes a set of salesperson emotional behaviors that influence the co-creation of value propositions with customers. This paper uncovers five salesperson emotional behavior archetypes influencing VPCC.

This study advances the value proposition literature by linking salespeople’s emotional behaviors with micro-level activities in the collaborative crafting of value propositions. The unique methodology may encourage researchers to apply video recordings in future studies.

The study provides managerial guidelines for improved selling competence and sales team organization.

This study’s findings represent a new insight into the actual manifestations of salesperson emotional behaviors that are commonly discussed but rarely observed directly.

This paper aims to explore salesperson–customer interactions to identify actual behaviors that result in enhanced customer disclosure and classify them as disclosure tactics, and to explore whether certain tactics are more likely to lead to salesperson–customer relationship advancement.

This qualitative research uses conversation analysis to identify salesperson disclosure tactics that result in customer disclosure, using 12 video-recordings of authentic business-to-business initial sales meetings between a salesperson and customer.

Findings showed four disclosure tactics that salespeople use to get customers to disclose information: embedded expertise claims, tailored references, demonstrations of preparation and customer orientation and benevolence. These tactics appear more often and are executed differently in sales meetings that successfully advance.

The research addresses an unexplored area of specific salesperson behaviors and their connection to customer disclosure and relationship advancement in the exploration phase. Additionally, this fills a gap that cannot be addressed with traditional survey or interview data and brings conversation analysis to this particular area.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate what values luxury customers may seek to fulfill during their interaction with salespersons and how perceived value fulfillment may impact salesperson loyalty and store loyalty. The paper also examines the moderating effect of the degree of friendship with a salesperson.

The authors conducted a survey using a close-ended questionnaire. In total, 22 luxury fashion brand stores located in eight of the largest department stores in Seoul, Korea, were selected as the luxury fashion retail context for the research. A total of 220 questionnaires were used for data analysis.

Fulfillment of self-oriented values had a significant positive influence on store loyalty and fulfillment of stimulation had a significant positive influence on salesperson loyalty. There was significant interaction effect between stimulation and degree of friendship on salesperson loyalty.

The results of this study provide practical implications in the management of customer relationship. An emphasis on qualities of luxury products that are linked to the fulfillment of self-oriented and/or personal values such as superior quality or ability to gain emotional benefits should be warranted for success as a luxury brand or a luxury retailer.

This research is important as it can inform luxury salesperson on how to better meet customer's psychological needs in the context of a selling situation; ultimately contribute to their salesperson loyalty and loyalty to the brand.