Getting to Right: How Do Managers Make Good Decisions about Customers?
研究销售经理如何做出关于顾客的战术决策，比较了适应性决策与快速节俭决策两种方法，发现管理者依赖经验、过度自信并采用经验法则，可能牺牲决策准确性。
Good customer relationships are more critical than ever to business strategy and success. As such, the maxim “the customer is always right” is valued by managers who understand the benefi ts of acquiring and retaining quality customers. But how do these managers get it right when it comes to making important, tactical decisions about their customers? That was the general question that Johannes Bauer (University of St. Gallen), Philipp Schmitt (Goethe University Frankfurt), and their New York University colleagues Vicki Morwitz and Russell Winer, set out to answer in their investigation of the decision-making behaviors of sales managers. The team acknowledged that companies are fi ne-tuning their efforts to collect and process massive amounts of customer data aimed at increasing the lifetime value of individual customers to their fi rms and maximizing the overall asset value of their customers, yet they asserted that there is still much to learn about how managers actually make decisions about customers, particularly the steps involved and the factors that shape their decision making. Their study was guided by the concept of bounded rationality—the idea that individuals make decisions based on a limited amount of information about the task at hand, using their own limited mental capabilities, and according to the environmental constraints in which the task is undertaken (Simon, 1955). Bauer and his colleagues surmised that managers typically rely on their experience, tend to be over confi dent, and employ rule-of-thumb approaches that may result in a faster, acceptable decision. However, this may come at the expense of decision accuracy while foregoing optimal returns on the resources invested in the task. Bauer and his colleagues compared two approaches to decision making that illuminate bounded rationality: (a) adaptive decision making, which suggests that managers would respond differently and fl exibly to a task depending on the variables in the environment in which the decision is being made (Payne et al., 1993); and (b) fast and frugal decision making, where the managers would prefer a tested, simplifi ed mental calculus based on a limited set of information about the issues at hand (Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996).