Serve as a Recommendation Agent

“Retailer” is derived from a French term meaning to sell in small quantities. The retailer buys from wholesalers and then breaks down each purchase in order to vend to individual consumers. As the last link in the supply chain, the retailer is expected to carry a range of alternatives and recommend to the shopper which alternatives to purchase.
     This applies to retailers of services as well as of products. Consumers expect services retailers to advise which blend of alternatives would be best or at least ethically inform the shopper when the sole service available wouldn’t be appropriate for this shopper. A services retailer like a real estate agent does well to maintain a wide inventory and to caution the shopper when none of the choices in the current inventory fits.
     To fulfill these expectations whenever the shopper is making more than a routine, habitual purchase, the retailer should become what consumer researchers call a “recommendation agent.”
     Research at University of Alabama and Brigham Young University identified five major sources that shoppers use to gather information to help them make purchase decisions.
    Three are in the retailer’s purview:

• Visiting stores and retailers’ websites 
• Advertisements 
• Sampling 

     The profitable retailer will use those three to reinforce or to redirect from advice given by the remaining two major sources:

• Friends 
• Independent reviews, such as Consumer Reports 

     Researchers at Erasmus University and University of Alberta explored how decision processes change for shoppers when a retail salesperson aims to be accepted as a recommendation agent. The researchers found that the shopper assesses the recommended alternative against more options than otherwise. This doesn’t necessarily prolong the selection, though.
     If your customer quickly goes through comparing your top choice to the alternatives, this could be evidence you have gained the trust reserved for a recommendation agent. You might want to use this to go on giving more recommendations.
     The Erasmus/Alberta research findings also suggest the sorts of purchase decisions where you could best go on—ones where there is substantial variability among the choices.
     You might think that when there are broad differences among the alternatives, the shopper would find it easier to make a choice. And you’d be right in circumstances where the shopper has not come to trust the salesperson as a recommendation agent. However, the trust reverses the classical consumer behavior finding: The more variability, the greater the influence of the face-to-face recommendation agent.

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