Customer reception: can highlighting non-compliance make it seem normal?
Reception signs and appointment confirmations sometimes describe what goes wrong rather than what is expected. The management question is specific: to encourage visitors to prepare a document or follow a procedure, should an organisation emphasise how often people fail to do so?
What the literature establishes
Robert B. Cialdini, Raymond R. Reno and Carl A. Kallgren (1990, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) distinguish descriptive norms, what others do, from injunctive norms, what is approved or expected. Their experiments on littering show that the norm made salient helps shape behaviour. Applied to a reception message, this distinction cautions against treating “many visitors forget this document” as equivalent to a clear statement of the desired action.
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 brought consumption closer to the average, with an undesirable effect among initially low-consuming households; a signal of approval eliminated this boomerang effect in their study. The mechanism matters for reception: describing a widespread practice can provide a behavioural reference point, even when the organisation specifically wants to discourage it.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that the solution is simply to announce that most visitors follow the instructions. That would replace a communication problem with a claim that must be true, documented and relevant to the audience concerned. The more cautious approach is to state the expected action and its purpose directly, without inventing a majority behaviour. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these findings do not demonstrate
These studies concern littering in public places and household consumption, not the reception of customers or partners in Lausanne. They therefore cannot quantify the effect of rewording a message on visitor preparedness or satisfaction. A missing document may also reflect inaccessible instructions, a language barrier or a practical inability to obtain it: no normative message can resolve these obstacles on its own.
A practical check in Lausanne
As part of SHR’s “Accueil client” programme, a Lausanne team could test an appointment confirmation, whether it receives medtech partners, higher education visitors, international sports delegations or customers of scale-ups across the Lake Geneva region. For a genuinely necessary requirement, randomly compare the existing message mentioning forgotten documents, if there is one, with a message stating only the required document, its purpose and the available alternative if difficulties arise, leaving all other information unchanged. Measure the proportion of appointments for which the required document is available at first contact, dividing compliant cases by all relevant appointments and distinguishing languages and visit types. A favourable result would support this wording in the setting tested, without by itself proving that descriptive norms explain the observed difference. To go further: explore the Client Reception training in Lausanne in the canton of Vaud, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Client Reception in Lausanne
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