Warmth during non-productive retail encounters: the hidden side of productivity

Productivity in retailing usually has been narrowly defined in short term economic performance. Although this is important, underlying salespersons' decisions are at work. As the core encounter of the entire value adding process from beginning to end, the interaction between salespeople and customers in the final step before consumption must be vital to understand the underlying human factors at work. We argue that this 'soft' side (human factor) determines the 'hard' productivity outcomes and that the dynamics of the service delivery process must be understood. Therefore, in this paper the point of sale has been studied second-by-second from the customer perspective to simulate how evaluations and perceptions vary during the encounter. By mapping the dynamic aspects we attempt to unravel the hidden side of how productivity is generated. The results obtained in two different 'non-productive' retail encounters show that there is a substantial correlation between perceived warmth during the service encounter as a measure of perceived relationship and Likeability, perceived service quality and loyalty. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.