Letting customers win: live chat agent effectiveness in B2C sales negotiations
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Sales negotiations over Internet-enabled live chat portals are increasingly common in business-to-consumer (B2C) durable product sales, but little is known about sales agent effectiveness in this context. Drawing from theories of scarcity and information processing, this study conceptualizes three sales agent tactics: the concession tactic, the delay tactic, and the value affirmation tactic, that interact to enhance the likelihood of closing sales. Unique live chat data and archival performance data from a national home appliance retailer were employed to develop a validated corpus of textual cues to capture sales agent closing tactics and to test the proposed hypotheses. The results show that the concession of an unadvertised discount is effective in increasing the likelihood of sales closing, and a delay in the discount request-response timing positively moderates this effect. By contrast, agents' tactics to affirm product values have the opposite effect of reducing the effectiveness of the unadvertised discount. A live chat lab simulation study supports the mediating mechanism of perceived discount scarcity and extends the value affirmation tactic's negative moderation effect to situations when the delay is long.
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Ph. D.