I’m sure you’ve heard of this oft-repeated advice: Reach out to your customers. Know them. Know what they want or need. When you are face to face with the customer, establish eye contact, smile, nod your head up and down, or even sit next to customers? tables. But (literally) touch the customer?

Researchers claim that non-verbal behaviors have five times the impact of verbal messages on judgments of a communicator?s friendliness and liking for the message recipient. This is true, I think, especially when you are delivering a speech or even a marketing pitch. You really have to use all the gestures, facial expressions, and body movements just to put your message across.

A good combination of verbal and non-verbal communication is very effective indeed. But in dealing with customers, the interpersonal touching is never encouraged. One obvious reason for this is that many managers fear their customers might react negatively to being touched.

An interesting study however reveals that consumers respond positively, not negatively, when touched by employees who are serving them. In retail store settings, for example, briefly touching customers has been shown to increase the customers? shopping times, store evaluations and purchase amounts. The same is true in restaurants where customers who have been briefly touched by a server have been found to evaluate the server more favorably, to evaluate the restaurant more favorably, and to leave the server larger tips.

The study has already taken into consideration the sex of the employees and customers involved here. And there had been no negative effect. It did not however cover the duration of the touch. Another study was conducted by Michael Lynn, Joseph-Mykal Le, and David Sherwyn. This time, they took into consideration the duration of the touch, the sex of who’s touching and touched, and the age, and their effects on tipping and/or positive/negative reaction.

The results suggest that men and women react equally positively to being personally touched, but that men react even more positively when their female companions are touched than when they are personally touched.

Very startling results, all right. However despite these results, many managers still hesitate encouraging their employees to touch customers. This non-verbal communication is just too risky to implement. It could open to a lot of lawsuits, especially that the two studies aforementioned did not include the race factor.

Now what do you think? I for one am squeamish about being touched by someone I do not know. I would think that too forward. Surely, there are other ways to get more customers aside from touching him or her.

Source:
Reach Out and Touch Your Customer