Physical proximity as pleasure or pain? A critical review of employee–customer proximity in sales and services settings

Abstract

This paper presents a critical review of published findings pertaining to the physical proximity between employees and customers in various sales and service settings. Following an overview of this stream of research, reflections are then offered on how the concepts of personal space and physical proximity may have changed in terms of their financial and well-being-related effects as a function of the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the risk of infection in interpersonal interactions, and despite the affiliative aspects associated with physical proximity, recent recipes for success—as advocated by academics—may eventually have a negative impact on multiple crucial metrics in a post-pandemic world, such that employees’ physical proximity to customers may soon come with a wide array of costly consequences. The article concludes with a set of future research directions.

Viral Viruses and Modified Mobility: Cyberspace Disease Salience Predicts Human Movement Patterns

“…However, in terms of the average number of items sold per hour, the effect of cyberspace disease salience occurred only in moderately to heavily crowded stores that had more than 36 shoppers per hour on average. Together, these findings suggest that consumers purchased more in crowded stores to "buy their way out" of close physical contact with others, with this effect being particularly pronounced under conditions of cyberspace disease salience (Otterbring, 2022;Otterbring et al, 2021).…”

“…For example, after the pandemic outbreak, people were less likely to touch fresh fruits and vegetables when shopping and showed a lower preference for cash payments, while preference for contactless payment methods increased (Otterbring & Bhatnagar, 2022). All in all, as a result of the ongoing pandemic, consumers are likely to prefer a greater distance from service staff and other customers and expect people to respect their personal space (Otterbring, 2022).…”

Shortsighted sales or long-lasting loyalty? The impact of salesperson-customer proximity on consumer responses and the beauty of bodily boundaries

“…To test our proximity conceptualization, consumers indicated the distance between the salesperson and themselves during the service encounter (1 = very close; 9 = very distant; Esmark and Noble, 2018;Esmark Jones et al, 2020;Otterbring et al, 2021). This item has been shown to correlate strongly with objective manipulations of interpersonal distances in sales settings (Otterbring, 2022), thus ensuring validity of our proximity measure. To capture discomfort, consumers indicated how the distance between the salesperson and themselves made them feel on a single-item scale (1 = uncomfortable; 9 = comfortable; Ainsworth and Foster, 2017).…”

“…The literature on salesperson-customer proximity is surprisingly scarce (Argo and Dahl, 2020; Esmark and Noble, 2018; Otterbring, 2022). We conducted a systematic literature search on Scopus (June 22, 2022) using a search string including “proxemic OR physical proximity OR physical distance OR personal space OR interpersonal distance” in combination with “customer OR consumer” while limiting the subject area of interest to “Business, Management, and Accounting, including Psychology” and solely including journal articles in English.…”

“…Besides exclusions of conceptual papers (McElroy et al , 1990) and literature reviews (Otterbring, 2022), we also excluded articles that focused explicitly on aspects related to customer-customer proximity rather than salesperson-customer proximity (Argo et al , 2005; Blanchard et al , 2020; Luck and Benkenstein, 2015); articles that investigated crowding or social density effects rather than effects stemming from physical proximity [1] (Levav and Zhu, 2009; Maeng et al , 2013; Consiglio et al , 2018), and articles that were not clearly related to a certain consumption context (Albert and Dabbs, 1970; Ernest and Cooper, 1974; Mencl and May, 2009), leaving a total of six empirical articles. We also carefully overviewed each of the initial 65 articles, including two recent literature reviews on the topics of social influence effects in various consumption contexts (Argo and Dahl, 2020) and salesperson-proximity effects in sales and service settings (Otterbring, 2022), resulting in the inclusion of one additional article (Gillani et al , 2021). The final sample comprised seven articles, including 17 empirical studies of relevance for the current work (see Table 1), and highlights the mixed findings in this stream of research as further illustrated below.…”