Think about the last time you bought something from a salesperson you genuinely trusted. Maybe it was a car, a piece of technology, or a financial product. Did that trust make you more likely to return to the same person the next time you needed something similar? And what about the salesperson’s knowledge or reputation? Did those qualities change how comfortable you felt during the interaction?
These are the kinds of questions that a team of researchers set out to explore in a study published in the European Journal of Business and Management Research. The study investigated how customers’ perceptions of a salesperson’s trustworthiness, expertise, and reputation shape their willingness to maintain a long-term relationship with that salesperson. The researchers proposed that these perceptions do not directly lead to customer commitment. Instead, they work through two intermediate experiences: how enjoyable the customer finds the interaction, and how much risk the customer feels is involved.
What we already know, and what was missing
Omidreza Ghanadiof, a graduate of industrial management at the University of Central Missouri, led the study alongside Ali Sanayei and Mahdi Emami from the University of Isfahan in Iran. The team noted that while plenty of research has examined company-to-customer relationships in broad terms, less attention has been paid to how a customer’s perception of an individual salesperson influences the decision to keep buying from that person.
To understand the study, it helps to define a few key ideas. “Trust” in this context refers to a customer’s belief that the salesperson acts in good faith and is looking out for mutual benefit rather than trying to exploit the situation. “Expertise” means the salesperson’s specialized knowledge, their ability to answer questions competently, and their grasp of the products they sell. “Reputation” (which the researchers sometimes call “seller appearance” or “credibility”) describes the customer’s overall impression of the salesperson’s honesty, attention, and professional image.
The researchers also introduced two experiences that sit between these perceptions and a customer’s eventual commitment. “Pleasant interaction” refers to a customer’s emotional and cognitive evaluation of how enjoyable and satisfying their exchanges with a salesperson have been. “Perceived risk” captures the customer’s sense of uncertainty and worry about potential negative outcomes from continuing the relationship. The central idea was that trust, expertise, and reputation first shape how pleasant the interaction feels and how risky it seems, and those feelings then determine whether the customer commits to staying with that salesperson over time.
How the study was conducted
The research team surveyed 250 customers of a retail company in Iran. They distributed an electronic questionnaire using a convenience sampling approach, meaning they recruited participants who were readily accessible rather than selecting them randomly from a larger population. The questionnaire was built from existing academic literature on buyer-seller relationships and was checked for validity using three methods: face validity (whether the questions appeared relevant to experts), convergent validity (whether related items correlated with each other as expected), and divergent validity (whether distinct concepts were measured separately).
The overall reliability of the questionnaire, measured by a statistic called Cronbach’s alpha, came in at 0.84. Cronbach’s alpha is a number between 0 and 1 that indicates how consistently a set of survey questions measures the same underlying idea. A value above 0.7 is generally considered acceptable, so the instrument met that standard. Individual variables also showed strong reliability scores, ranging from 0.841 for trust to 0.928 for expertise.
To test the relationships between variables, the researchers used a statistical technique called Structural Equation Modeling, specifically a version known as Partial Least Squares (PLS), run through SmartPLS software. This approach allowed them to examine multiple connected relationships at once, testing whether trust, expertise, and reputation were linked to pleasant interaction and perceived risk, and whether those two experiences were in turn linked to commitment to the salesperson. The overall model fit, measured by a statistic called Goodness of Fit (GOF), was 0.756. Values above 0.36 are considered strong, so the model appeared to fit the data well.
What the data revealed
The study tested eight hypotheses, and six of them were supported by the data. Starting with pleasant interaction: trust, reputation, and expertise were all positively linked to customers reporting more enjoyable interactions with salespeople. Of the three, expertise showed the strongest association (path coefficient of 0.511, t-value of 7.498), followed by trust (0.257, t-value of 3.245) and reputation (0.239, t-value of 4.098). In plain terms, customers who viewed their salesperson as knowledgeable, trustworthy, and reputable tended to report more satisfying exchanges.
The picture was different when it came to perceived risk. Trust was linked to lower perceived risk, with a negative path coefficient of -0.487 and a t-value of 3.48. This means that customers who trusted their salesperson tended to feel less worried about negative outcomes. However, neither the salesperson’s expertise nor their reputation showed a statistically significant link to perceived risk. The t-values for those two relationships (1.345 and 1.489, respectively) fell below the threshold of 1.96, which is the standard cutoff for statistical significance at the 95% confidence level. In other words, a salesperson being knowledgeable or well-regarded did not appear to reduce the customer’s sense of risk on its own.
Finally, the two intermediate experiences were both linked to commitment. Pleasant interaction had a strong positive association with commitment to the salesperson (path coefficient of 0.899, t-value of 22.254), the strongest relationship in the entire model. Perceived risk had a negative association with commitment (path coefficient of -0.128, t-value of 3.098), meaning that customers who felt more risk were less likely to commit to staying with that salesperson.
To trace the full chain: trust was linked to more pleasant interactions and lower perceived risk. Expertise and reputation were linked to more pleasant interactions but were not directly linked to reduced risk. Pleasant interactions were strongly associated with commitment, while perceived risk was moderately associated with lower commitment.
What this could mean for businesses
The findings suggest several practical considerations for companies that rely on salespeople to build customer relationships. The strongest pathway to customer commitment in this study ran through pleasant interaction. This implies that training salespeople to create positive, enjoyable experiences for customers may be more directly connected to loyalty than simply reducing the customer’s sense of risk.
The results also highlight the distinctive role of trust. It was the only salesperson characteristic linked to both more pleasant interactions and lower perceived risk. Expertise and reputation, while important for making interactions enjoyable, did not appear to calm customers’ worries about potential downsides. The researchers suggested that companies might benefit from investing in hiring processes that identify people skilled at building personal trust, perhaps using psychological assessments, and from creating formal systems to gather customer feedback about how trustworthy they find their sales contacts.
The team also recommended that sales managers encourage the development of interpersonal relationship skills alongside technical product knowledge. A salesperson who knows everything about the product but struggles to build a personal connection may not reduce the customer’s sense of risk. The researchers pointed to consultative selling, where the salesperson acts more like an advisor helping solve the customer’s problem, as a training approach worth considering.
Important limitations to keep in mind
There are several caveats worth noting. The study used a convenience sample of 250 customers from a single retail company in Iran, which limits how broadly the findings can be applied to other industries, countries, or cultural contexts. Convenience sampling means the participants were not randomly selected, so the sample may not represent the broader population of retail customers.
The study design was survey-based and observational, not experimental. This means the researchers measured associations between variables, but the results do not prove that one factor caused another. For example, while trust was associated with lower perceived risk, it is possible that customers who are generally less risk-averse are also more inclined to trust salespeople, rather than trust itself reducing their sense of risk.
Additionally, the data was collected at a single point in time, so the study cannot speak to how these relationships might change as a customer-salesperson relationship develops over months or years. Long-term relationships might show different patterns than those captured in a one-time survey.
Despite these limitations, the study offers a structured look at how different aspects of a customer’s perception of a salesperson may connect to their willingness to maintain that relationship, with enjoyable interaction emerging as a particularly strong link in the chain.
