Salesperson Behavior And Customer Satisfaction

According to Hazrati et al (2012), sales position credit increases where sales are becoming increasingly important in the organization. Competition has pushed all companies to invest more money to increase professional salespeople and skilled marketers. Building a solid relationship with customers is one of the most important factors in successful sales force assessments as strong relationships can lead to surviving and growing customers and generating long-term profit. Salespersons’ responsibility to present the company product or service directly to the potential customer. A salesperson needs to attract customers and build a relationship that would have long-term and friendly relations with customers. This is because customer loyalty is one of the factors to develop a long-term relationship because able to provide a good service to them in order to make them loyal and making a repeat purchase of the product or service. The literature suggests that salespeople should enhance customer satisfaction and trust (Doney & Cannon, 1997; Dwyer, Schurr, & Oh, 1987; Ganesan, 1994; Morgan & Hunt, 1994), or what some researchers call “relationship quality” (Crosby, Evans, & Cowles, 1990). Definitions of ethical and unethical behaviors are based on the fact that how much activity is correct or wrong, good or bad, fair or unfair (Chen and Mau, 2009). Mei-Fang Chena & Liang-Hung Maua (2009) focused on how a salesperson’s ethical and unethical sales behavior can build or deplete both customer trust in the salesperson and in the company, which in turn influences customer loyalty in the electronic product.

According to previous studies, the salesperson’s ethical behaviour can play an important role to develop and keep long-term relations with customers (Chen and Mau, 2009). Which refer to the salesperson behaviour whether it’s ethical or unethical can bring a positive or negative impact on customer satisfaction. The level of customer satisfaction can be measure from the result of the quality of salesperson service behaviour. The previous studies stated that salesperson behaving ethically sells only those products which they believe they are useful for customers, they promise to deliver what they can do and they keep data on their customers’ secrets (Hansen and Riggle, 2009). There will be situations that would endanger the brand image or reputation when the salesperson becomes disobedient about the organization’s rules or ethical codes. For example, there is a case where a salesperson becomes bias toward a customer because of the customer’s appearance when went to the store. Other cases that might violate the organizations’ ethical policies and codes where the Salespersons work and they are not supervised or they are not concern about the ethical codes. Besides, Salespersons are evaluated usually based on short-term performance and objectives. Thus, exaggeration and mistakes could happen in the sales negotiations (Chen and Mau, 2009).

While Some of the salesperson’s unethical behaviors are lying or overstating about a product’s uses, lying about accessibility, lying about rivals, selling products to the customer while the customer does not need it, answering customers’ questions while the salesperson does not know enough information to answer and using influence tactics or high-pressure selling techniques (Roman and Ruiz, 2005).

The present research focuses on the salesperson’s behavior and its impacts on customers and its results. Due to the competitive global market and organic growth of companies, salespersons are being regarded much more than before and to keep a professional and experienced salesperson is very hard nowadays. Hazrati et al (2012) reported that Strategic changes inside companies, globalization, changes in customers’ needs, and rivals’ activities in the market are some shocks that can make the distance between customers and salespersons. This is because to maintain their organization in the competitive market, the organizations depend on the salesperson as their sales representatives to keep themselves in the market. Most argumentations between customers and salespersons originate from the unethical behavior of salespersons. Thus, the impacts of salespersons’ ethical or unethical behavior on customers’ satisfaction should be regarded more (Chen and Mau, 2009).