Customer query handling in sales interactions

Using a novel approach with video-recordings of sales interactions, this study focuses on a dynamic analysis of salesperson effectiveness in handling customer queries. We conceptualize salesperson behaviors, namely, resolving, relating, and emoting, as separate elements of customer query handling and empirically identify the distinct verbal and nonverbal cues that salespeople use to display these behaviors during sales interactions. We draw from compensation effects in social cognition theory to propose that customers’ perceptions of a salesperson’s effectiveness are prone to trade-offs between competence (resolving behaviors) and warmth (relating and emoting behaviors). Results, robust to endogeneity corrections, support the proposed tradeoffs such that the effectiveness of salesperson’s resolving behavior is significantly curtailed, even neutralized, by the salesperson’s relating and emoting behaviors. We situate these counterintuitive results within the extant theory and research on sales interactions, and outline implications for practice.     

Sample attrition in the RLMS, 2001–10

The data of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) – Higher School of Economics represents one of the few nationally representative sources of household and individual data for Russia. These data have been collected since 1992 and in recent years, thanks to more secure financial and logistical support, have become a resource increasingly drawn upon by scholars and students for national and cross-national studies. In this paper, we examine the extent of non-random attrition in the RLMS and discuss the circumstances under which this might give rise to biases in econometric analysis. We illustrate this with an example drawn from the health sphere.     

New Product Development For Service Companies

It is well known that services differ from manufactured goods in a number of significant ways. Services are largely intangible, produced and consumed simultaneously, heterogeneous and perishable. These differences can lead to changes in service management. Christopher J. Easingwood has investigated how new products development practices in service organizations may reflect these differences. He has profiled practices found in a sample of service companies in the United Kingdom on topics ranging from idea generation to post-launch assessment, together with the strategic role and organizational location of new products. A number of special characteristics of the new product activity in services companies are identified. For instance, the number of new product introductions may be restricted due to customer and staff confusion when faced with a proliferation of service products. Test markets are used primarily to ensure the proper functioning of the service rather than to provide a base for a national sales projection. These and other characteristics appear to be appropriate adaptations to the special features of services. They are part of a pattern that shows some of the ways that service companies have adapted the new product development process to meet unique problems in the service environment.     

Semi-quantitative risk assessment method for product management

The workshop presented a semi-quantitative risk assessment technique that can be used to judge the total risk on all undesired consequences/events for a product manufacturing operation. The technique requires an experienced team to judge risk utilizing a numerical rating system that, although arbitrarily chosen, is self consistent and provides a relative assessment of product manufacturing risk. Once calculated, the risk is compared to the product's net income for making risk management and product planning decisions. The workshop included an exercise where all participants could try the technique.     

Comment on the Kannai-Peleg impossibility theorem for extending orders

Recent work by Y. Kannai and B. Peleg shows that two appealing axioms for extending a linear order on a set of six or more elements to a weak order on the family of non-empty subsets of that set are mutually incompatible. This comment shows that a modest restriction of their monotonicity axiom is compatible for extension with a generalization of their other axiom provided that the linear order on the basic set is a well ordering.     

When bad news is sugarcoated: Information distortion,organizational search and the behavioral theory of the firm

Most work in strategy and organization theory assumes that performance feedback is straightforward to interpret and truthfully reported. We raise the following question: How might the systematic distortion of negative performance information affect organizational learning and future performance? We formulate a model where (1) members do not always report the truth about what they know about their performance level, especially when performance is below aspiration and (2) their propensity to distort information is subject to social influence. We find that organizations that are characterized by a high level of information distortion tend to perform more poorly but that the effect of a low rate of sugarcoating may, in some conditions, be more benign than the literatures seem to suggest. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.