The Canadian Press reported on UBC research which found that bargain hunters tend to be less sensitive to the needs of customer service staff, in effect seeing them as less than human.
One of the experiments found that humanizing terms such as friendly or helpful appeared far less often in online reviews for the low-cost carrier Ryanair than for the higher-end Lufthansa, even when results were adjusted for quality.
“I think almost every one of us is in that state at some point in their life through, say, a particular sale, and it’s not that we’re necessarily particularly bad people, but we can lose sight of what is really important,” said study co-author Johannes Boegershausen, a PhD student at UBC’s Sauder School of Business.
The CP story appeared in the National Post, CTV, Metro, News 1130, Times Colonist and Castanet.
