Salesperf: the salesperson service performance scale

Delivering outstanding service quality is essential to corporate success, and salespeople play a critical role in delivering high-quality service as boundary spanners between customers and the organization they represent.
Service quality and service performances have proliferated as topics in marketing literature for over two decades. This stream of research has emerged and continues to grow asa major focus of modern marketing with applications to every element of the marketing and promotion mix. Further, personal selling service adds value.
It is not unusual for salespeople to receive a bonus, recognition, or other compensation from excellent service as evaluated by customers.
Even more limited is research on the development of a specific measurement scale for gauging salespersonperformance
BACKGROUND
The firm’s salesperson service is essential to the delivery of services, to be effective; more salespeople are required to ensure customer satisfaction through long-term marketing relationships.
The relationship between salesperson and customer is often overlooked when measures of salesperson performance are being examined.
The salesperson–customer relationship andfound that great contact by salespeople contributed significantly to how customers perceived the status of salespeople.
The interaction of buyers and sellers and stressed that the process by which they interact greatly affects how customer value and satisfaction are optimized.
The increased importance to customers of consultative services among business-to business salespeople.
A customerevaluated a salesperson was significantly based on the salesperson’s expertise and trustworthiness and that both are critical to overall customer satisfaction.
The customer needs to be directly involved in the assessment of the salesperson. Numerous companies directly involve customers in salesperson service assessment.
Strengths and Weaknesses of the Existing
SERVPERF Scale
We identified onlytwo studies that explicitly measured service quality to assess salesperson service (SERVPERF scale), those identified five unique dimensions of salesperson service behaviors:
• Diligence
• Information communication
• Inducements
• Sportsmanship
• Empathy
The salesperson service behaviors significantly influenced some major customer outcomes such as satisfaction, trust, and share of thecustomer.
The important role that salespeople play in an organization’s service delivery process and to show how a service quality assessment could be used in the process of sales management.
Two tangibility items were deleted from the original SERVPERF scale as they related to company tangibles and the customers did not visit the physical facility, the psychometric properties of the SERVPERF scalehave not been adequately addressed, literature has called for improving the operationalization and psychometric properties of the SERVPERF scale by subjecting it to a rigorous confirmatory analysis and by validating its predictive power.


METHOD
Refinement of SERVPERF into SALESPERF
We began by taking the 21 items of Shepherd’s version of SERVPERF and changing the wording from referencing acompany or employees to referring specifically to a sales representative, the scale is explicit to identify the sales representative as the employee being evaluated, rather than any employees who may or may not be in sales or the company as a whole. For a complete list of items from SALESPERF, scale items were presented on a seven-point Likert scale, this scale utilized the endpoints “stronglydisagree” (1) and “strongly agree” (7)
Sample
A pool of 400 customers of a newspaper publisher was contacted by mail to fill out a survey. As part of the incentive for filling out the survey, a $50.00 advertising coupon was available that could be redeemed by the customer. A strict time limit was placed on the survey respondents so that survey responses would need to be returned within 10 days...