Customer reception: does background music really help the conversation?
Background music is often chosen to express an identity or make a place more welcoming. The management question is more precise: should that music continue during the first conversation with a visitor, and what outcome should guide the decision?
What the literature establishes
Ronald E. Milliman (1982, Journal of Marketing) studied the effects of different musical conditions on movement and sales in a supermarket. His field experiment shows that tempo can change the speed at which customers move and the volume of sales. It establishes a possible influence on behaviour, not a general improvement in reception quality.
The pace of the environment can change the pace of service
Ronald E. Milliman (1986, Journal of Consumer Research) extended this approach to a restaurant, examining meal duration and purchases under different musical tempos. The findings indicate that musical tempo can influence the course of a visit and certain categories of spending. Music is therefore more than a backdrop: it can affect behaviours whose value depends on the purpose of the service.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that slow music necessarily improves the customer experience. Yet spending longer somewhere means neither understanding an instruction better nor receiving better guidance. At reception, a longer conversation may reflect attentive service or difficulty hearing one another; the cited studies do not distinguish between these possibilities. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these data cannot decide
These experiments concern a supermarket and a restaurant, not a banking or institutional reception in Geneva. They cannot establish an appropriate sound level for multilingual conversations or different hearing needs. Yet common practice often involves approving an atmosphere in an empty room rather than checking its effects during interactions.
A practical check in Genève
One possible application within SHR’s « Accueil client » programme is to compare periods with and without music at a private bank, an international organisation, a luxury watchmaking company or a commodity trading firm in Geneva. Alternate conditions across comparable time slots while keeping staffing and procedures unchanged, then anonymously record the proportion of conversations involving a request for repetition explicitly linked to difficulty hearing. Also record visitor traffic and unusual noise, to avoid prematurely attributing a context-related difference to music. This measure does not capture reception quality as a whole, but it can establish whether the chosen atmosphere allows conversations to proceed without an additional hearing barrier. To go further: explore the Client Reception training in Geneva in the canton of Geneva, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Client Reception in Geneva
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