Shoo Away Negative Customer Feelings

Form a partnership with your customer. The customer gets a product and/or service that meets their needs well. You gain profitability from this sale and the enhanced probability of future sales.
     For it to work best, you’ll want a customer welcoming you achieving a gain. As it turns out, if the customer is in a negative mood, even your best intentions to help out the customer might fall short of producing feelings of reciprocity.
     Here’s a laboratory example of what I mean: Researchers at University of California-Berkeley and Duke University showed a group of study participants a film clip designed to irritate them: In the clip, an arrogant boss fires an employee, after which the employee destroys company property. Another group was shown a clip of the same length from the TV show “Friends.”
     Next, each participant was offered money to be split with a partner. The participant had to make a joint decision with the partner (actually one of the researchers) whether or not to accept $20. Unless both agreed to accept the money, neither would get anything.
     In some cases, the partner said, “Let’s take the money and split it evenly, with $10 for each of us.” No problem there. The participant was happy to agree to accept the money.
     In other cases, the partner said, “The only way I’ll agree to accept the $20 is if I get $15 and you get $5.” Something quite strange happened with this group. The participants who had been exposed to the irritating clip were more much more likely to turn down the offer than were those who had seen “Friends.” Their negative mood led to them wanting to deny the $15 to the other participant, even though this meant depriving themselves of $5.
     The same sort of thing that happened in the university laboratory can happen in your store. A clearly negative mood can lead to a customer wanting to deny you profitability. The remedy? Keep the transaction short. Findings from research at University of Maryland and Yale University indicate that too much talking will lock into the shopper's mind the bad feelings they're experiencing, and those negative memories make it less likely they'll return to your store in the future.

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Avoid Locking In Bad Moods