Prime time: The strategic use of subconscious priming to enhance customer satisfaction

A growing body of work explores how priming goals in the subconscious can improve employee productivity. Likewise, practitioners and scholars are seeking strategies and techniques for improving customer effectiveness in performing the roles they play as partial employees in their service experiences. The purpose of this article is to present the rationale and logic underlying subconscious goal setting, its application for improving customers’ success in their service experiences, a proposed typology of priming cues to illustrate how customers’ time spent waiting can be used to enhance their ability to successfully perform their co-production roles, and strategies organizations can use to improve customers’ performance in obtaining their expected service experience.