Individual differences in customer sociability

Two studies examined the quality of clerk‐customer interactions. In the first study, customers in a mall were followed from one purchase to another and retest reliability of customer sociability was found to be 0.73. A second study of the same and another mall found a retest reliability of 0.56 for customer sociability and a correlation of 0.57 between sociability of different salespersons serving the same customer. These results indicate that the sociability of salesperson—customer interactions is determined by stable individual differences in customer sociability, and suggest that salespeople do better to echo than to escalate customer sociability.