Wait a Minute Before Purging Customer Waits

Sometimes it’s more profitable to have customers wait a bit:

• In-store research by Envirosell finds that shoppers for fashion products such as dresses and hedonic products such as perfumes prefer to take a minute or two to settle in and look around before being approached by a staff member intending to make a sale. Wait.
• The customer might know they really should go to the income tax preparer or purchase the refill of that medicine or buy the wallpaper to replace what’s peeling and so no longer appealing. But if once the customer arrives, the retailer tells them they’ll have to wait for a while, you might hear from those customers a mighty sigh of relief. At least briefly. Researchers from Boston College, University of Miami, and Duke University point out that when it comes to buying unpleasant necessities, a longer wait—if handled properly by the retailer—can actually end up making the customer feel better about the whole experience.
• Ensuring the customers won’t have to wait to be served on the sales floor and at the cash/wrap can cost you money if you’ll need to have richer staffing. Is there counterbalancing revenue because prompt service produces higher customer satisfaction? Research at University of Mannheim and University of Texas-Austin indicates that the answer may be no. Compared to repeatedly satisfied customers, those who are repeatedly very highly satisfied will be willing to pay higher prices. And moving a customer from being dissatisfied to being repeatedly barely satisfied will lead to customer willingness to pay you more than loss leader prices. But once you get the customer to the barely satisfied level, you’d have to push hard to get the willingness climbing further. It stays level until you get to the range of very high satisfaction.
• Researchers at University of Maryland found that during the back and forth of negotiating a purchase price, the shopper will feel better about the final decision if the retailer waits a minute before responding with an okay or a counteroffer during each round.
• With products like theatre tickets or premium chocolate candies, the purchaser might enjoy it more if there’s a delay before they use the product. It’s the pleasure of anticipation. This argues for making sales on a schedule which requires the purchaser to wait for consumption.

Click below for more:
Assess the Costs of Customer Satisfaction
Help Customers Buy Unpleasant Necessities