Customer reception: standardise without losing sight of the request
Standardising customer reception reassures managers: expected behaviours become observable and teachable. Yet the management question is more precise: what should be standardised so that customers are directed towards a relevant response, rather than simply welcomed according to the rules?
What the literature establishes
Ananthanarayanan Parasuraman, Valarie A. Zeithaml and Leonard L. Berry (1985, Journal of Marketing) draw on exploratory research to propose a model of gaps that may undermine service quality. They distinguish, among other things, management's understanding of expectations, the translation of those expectations into specifications, and the service actually delivered. Applied to customer reception, this framework suggests a hypothesis: a perfectly executed procedure may still be inappropriate if it rests on a misunderstanding of the request.
Measuring service performance rather than compliance
J. Joseph Cronin Jr. and Steven A. Taylor (1992, Journal of Marketing) compare different ways of measuring service quality and provide empirical support for a measure based on perceived performance rather than the gap between expectations and perceptions. Their work shifts attention towards the customer's assessment of the service delivered. For a reception manager, this suggests that an internal compliance checklist should not be confused with a measure of perceived quality.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that scripts should be removed and every employee left to improvise. These studies do not, however, establish the superiority of reception without a protocol. A more defensible distinction is to standardise the checkpoints — a restated request, an appropriate contact, an explicit next step — while allowing discretion in how they are expressed. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot settle
The first article develops an exploratory model; the second examines the measurement of service quality, not the effectiveness of reception training. Neither demonstrates that restating a request, on its own, improves customer routing in a Lugano business. A favourable overall assessment may also conceal an incorrect referral, while a correct referral is not enough to guarantee a satisfactory experience.
A practical check in Lugano
Within SHR's « Accueil client » programme, one exercise could involve restating the request in Italian and asking the customer to confirm the next step, using cases from banking, fashion, trading businesses and Italian-speaking family SMEs in Lugano. Across two comparable periods, before and after this practice, the team would record referrals and subsequent rerouting caused by an initial misunderstanding, without collecting personal data. The indicator would be the proportion of referred requests requiring this correction, using a classification rule defined in advance. A decrease would be an operational signal to investigate, not causal proof of the training's effectiveness. To go further: explore the Client Reception training in Lugano, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Client Reception in Lugano
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