If you have to be told to be nice, it probably won’t work
I really don’t like self-help books. I mean, I REALLY don’t like them. The main issue I have with most of these books is that they overgeneralise. They take some anecdote or research finding and then tell everybody to do the same thing even if it is not in their personality to do so.
One example is the advice to pay your customers compliments and touch them (not inappropriately, of course). There are plenty of studies that show that customers who are paid a compliment or who are touched on the elbow by a waiter tend to leave higher tips afterwards. Similarly, people who are paid a compliment by a shop clerk on how good they look in the jeans they try on are more likely to buy the pair of jeans.
The result of these studies is that salespeople all over the world are now taught to pay compliments and “innocently” touch their clients on the elbow or shoulder to create a deeper feeling of intimacy and increase their sales success.
But not everybody is naturally inclined to touch strangers. I grew up in a family where physical contact was rare and we never paid compliments to each other or other people. That just wasn’t what we did. Then I married into a family that had a very different style with lots of hugging going on. And to me that was fantastic, because I am naturally more inclined to be a hugger, so I take full advantage of this. But for someone like my mother this would be anathema. She would feel very awkward hugging other people (unless they are in tears or about to die). It’s just not who she is and if you force her to touch a stranger, she would probably recoil.
And she is apparently not alone in this. A study by Andrea Luangrath from the University of Iowa tried to assess how salespeople feel when they are instructed to pay customers a compliment or touch them. What she found was that people who voluntarily touched customers on the elbow felt relatively good about that and didn’t feel that the situation was more awkward than normal (the results shown in the chart below are ratings of emotional affect and awkwardness on a 7-point scale, so 3.5 would be an average rating).
Meanwhile, people who were instructed by a researcher or a superior to touch their customers on the elbow while serving them a pie felt emotionally pressured to do so and thought the situation was rather awkward. Notable, if you ask the customers, they did not feel awkward or emotionally manipulated in either setting, whether the salesperson was voluntarily touching them or not.
Being told to touch a customer feels awkward
Source: Luangrath (2020).
So, one might argue, if the customer doesn’t know the difference, then people should just overcome their shyness and learn to touch their customers anyway. Not so fast. The study also found that those people who were instructed to touch their customers and didn’t do it voluntarily not only felt awkward. They later on tried to avoid contact with the customer they were instructed to touch. Because they felt awkward, they wanted to avoid the situation and thus reduced client service afterwards and lost out on future sales opportunities. In the end, instructing people to do something they don’t feel comfortable with backfired for everyone.