Measures a customer's perception that a specific salesperson made a genuine effort to understand their needs and recommended products aligned with those needs. The scale captures the functional — task-oriented and diagnostic — dimension of a salesperson's customer orientation, as evaluated from the customer's own perspective rather than from self-report by the salesperson.
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Used by Wieseke, Alavi & Habel (2014) in Study 3 (n = 308, German retail customers who had just completed a price negotiation with a salesperson). The authors labelled it 'functional customer orientation' to distinguish it from relational customer orientation, which concerns the salesperson's interpersonal warmth and relationship-building behaviour. The scale draws conceptual inspiration from the salesperson self-report scale of Homburg, Muller & Klarmann (2011), but the Wieseke et al. version was substantially rewritten for customer-perspective use; it is not a simple adaptation. Alpha = .86; AVE = .67, supporting convergent validity. Formal validity discussion was not provided but the AVE exceeds the conventional .50 threshold. Items use a stem ('The salesperson...') and are rated on a 7-point Likert scale. Distinct from the SOCO scale (ID 413, Saxe & Weitz 1982), which is a salesperson self-report measure of selling versus customer orientation across a broader domain.
Wieseke, J., Alavi, S., & Habel, J. (2014). Willing to pay more, eager to pay less: The role of customer loyalty in price negotiations. Journal of Marketing, 78(6), 17-37.
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