Customer reception: restating a rule without normalising non-compliance
At reception, rules are often accompanied by comments about what other customers do. The management question is specific: how can staff restate a requirement without making non-compliance seem socially normal?
What the literature establishes
Robert B. Cialdini, Raymond R. Reno and Carl A. Kallgren (1990, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) distinguish descriptive norms, which indicate what others do, from injunctive norms, which indicate what is approved. Their experiments on littering show that behaviour depends in part on which norm is made salient in a situation. For customer reception, this distinction suggests separating the stated requirement from comments about how frequently people fail to meet it.
When comparison has the opposite effect
P. Wesley Schultz, Jessica M. Nolan, Robert B. Cialdini, Noah J. Goldstein and Vladas Griskevicius (2007, Psychological Science) studied messages comparing households’ electricity consumption with that of their neighbours. Descriptive information reduced consumption among households initially above the average, but increased it among those initially below it; a signal of approval eliminated this unwanted effect in their study. Social comparison therefore does not necessarily move everyone in the intended direction.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that the answer is simply to write, “Most of our customers follow this rule.” That would confuse a documented mechanism with a universal recipe, and such a claim requires actual data. A more cautious approach is to make the expected action explicit without portraying non-compliance as a collective habit. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these data cannot establish
These studies concern littering and energy consumption, not bank reception, clothing retail or trading businesses. They do not demonstrate that rewording alone improves the completeness of customer files or the quality of the relationship. A missing item may also reflect inaccessible instructions, difficulty obtaining a document or a language mismatch: the message does not resolve these obstacles.
A practical check in Lugano
As part of SHR’s « Accueil client » programme, a Lugano team could test a written reminder in Italian covering a single requirement: a document needed for a bank appointment, proof of purchase for a return at a fashion boutique, or an order reference at an Italian-speaking family-owned trading SME. Over a period defined in advance, randomly assign the relevant appointments either the existing reminder or a version of equal length that retains the useful information but replaces the comment about frequent omissions with the expected action. For each version, measure the proportion of customers arriving with the required item, keeping access conditions and notice periods unchanged and recording requests for clarification separately. This local check would test wording, not a presumed cultural characteristic of customers in Ticino. To go further: explore the Client Reception training in Lugano in the canton of Ticino, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Client Reception in Lugano
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