The Moderating Role of Customer Orientation Experience on Salespersons’ Attitude and Customer Patronage

Getting and keeping customers are usually tough jobs particularly in a
competitive industry such as Smartphones and Accessories retailing. While
salespersons’ attitude has been fingered to either bolster or inhibit customer loyalty,
learning to treat the customer as a king could be the game changer required to both
improve the salesperson’s attitude and capture customer loyalty. In this study the role
of customer orientation experience in better understanding the relationships between
salespersons attitude and customer loyalty is interrogated. To achieve the aim of the
study, a survey research design was adopted. To generate data, copies of a structured
questionnaire were randomly administered on 223 employees who serve as
salespersons in the relevant retail outlets at the sampling site. For data analyses, a
combination of SPSS (version 26) and Hayes (2022) process software were employed.
While the descriptive statistics were done and presented in tables, frequencies and
percentages, regression analysis was used for the inferential statistics. The study
indicates the three dimensions of salesperson’s attitude positively influenced customer
patronage. Also, it was found that customer orientation moderated the relationship
between a salesperson’s attitude and customer patronage. Subsequently, it was
recommended that business owners should ensure that those who serve as salespersons
are properly trained on how to put up good listening and ethical attitudes as well as
emotional intelligence in their dealings with customers as the preachment of customer
orientation is to render kingly service to customers whose patronage is the sole rudder
for the survival of a business.