Customer reception: is a visible phone really neutral?
At reception, rules generally address phone use, rarely the mere presence of a device. The managerial question is more specific: should an unused phone be kept out of sight to protect the quality of the interaction?
What the literature establishes
Andrew Przybylski and Netta Weinstein (2013, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships) experimentally studied conversations with and without a mobile phone present. Their findings indicate that its presence can reduce perceived relationship quality, particularly when the conversation concerns something personally meaningful. They therefore show that an object need not actively interrupt a conversation to change how it is experienced.
Availability also makes demands on attention
Adrian Ward, Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy and Maarten Bos (2017, Journal of the Association for Consumer Research) manipulated the location of participants’ smartphones during cognitive tasks. In their experiments, some measures of performance were better when the device was in another room rather than on the desk. This finding concerns the owner’s cognitive resources, not the visitor’s impression: the two mechanisms should remain distinct.
The premature conclusion
It would be excessive to conclude that every visible phone undermines every reception encounter. The work of Andrew Przybylski and Netta Weinstein (2013, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships) specifically highlights the importance of conversational content. A device explicitly used to check an appointment does not necessarily carry the same meaning as a personal phone left between the participants; that distinction still needs to be tested in practice. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these experiments cannot settle
These studies are not evaluations of reception desks in Lausanne and do not directly measure whether requests are resolved. Their experimental designs cannot establish a universal rule for professional tools, brief interactions or accessibility requirements. Removing a visible phone can therefore be a working hypothesis, but not a substitute for observing actual service quality.
A practical check in Lausanne
Within SHR’s « Accueil client » programme, a field exercise could be offered to reception teams in medtech companies, higher education institutions, international sports organisations and scale-ups across the Lake Geneva region: compare similar time slots, first with the usual arrangement and then with unused phones out of sight. After each interaction, an optional anonymous survey asks the same question: “During this interaction, did the person welcoming you seem fully attentive?”, with the answers “yes”, “partly” or “no”. The team compares the proportion of “yes” answers, reporting the number of responses and recording differences in visitor traffic and types of requests, without changing access to necessary tools. This local check does not establish causality on its own, but provides a verifiable basis for deciding whether to retain the arrangement. To go further: explore the Client Reception training in Lausanne, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Client Reception in Lausanne
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