In Lugano, is putting yourself in the client’s shoes enough?
In a bank, fashion business or trading company in Lugano, preparing a proposal involves anticipating what matters to the client. The management question is specific: does asking employees to put themselves in the client’s shoes actually improve their knowledge of the client’s priorities?
What the literature establishes
Nicholas Epley, Boaz Keysar, Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich (2004, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) describe perspective taking as a process that can begin with one’s own viewpoint and proceed through adjustment. That adjustment can remain insufficient: sincerely trying to understand someone does not guarantee moving beyond one’s own frame of reference. For a sales manager, a plausible assumption about a client’s expectations therefore remains an assumption.
Obtaining a perspective rather than imagining it
Tal Eyal, Mary Steffel and Nicholas Epley (2018, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) compared imagining another person’s perspective with obtaining information directly from that person. In their experiments, instructions to take another person’s perspective did not consistently improve judgement accuracy, whereas conversation could improve it. The useful mechanism is therefore not simply additional mental effort, but access to previously unavailable information.
The premature conclusion
It would be excessive to conclude that putting yourself in the client’s shoes serves no purpose. These findings concern the accuracy of judgements about others, not every relational function of perspective taking. Above all, they suggest using that effort to prepare questions rather than taking the answers for granted. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not allow us to promise
These experiments do not demonstrate that a discovery conversation increases sales or prevents disputes in Lugano businesses. A client may be uncertain, preserve room for negotiation or change priorities after seeing an offer. In an Italian-speaking family SME as in a bank, a longstanding relationship therefore does not, on its own, validate current preferences.
A practical check in Lugano
As part of SHR’s “Communication” programme, a Lugano team could test the following protocol: before a client conversation, the employee records the three criteria they expect to be priorities, then asks the client to state and rank their own before presenting the offer. Banking, fashion, trading and Italian-speaking family SMEs can retain their sector-specific criteria while applying the same comparison rule. Over a period defined in advance, measure the proportion of conversations in which the predicted top criterion matches the client’s stated top criterion, retaining the wording and establishing the matching rule beforehand. This indicator measures the accuracy of anticipation at the time of the conversation, not future satisfaction or the causal effect of training. To go further: explore the Communication training in Lugano in the canton of Ticino, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Communication in Lugano
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