Customer Interaction

[Jfry]

Is there a guide to how customer interaction works? The tutorial explained some of it mentioning "sincerity" and "mood", but then in the game there are "happiness" and "need" without explanation of the mechanics. So far I've found interacting with customers to be a bunch of unpleasant rapid clicking to increase the percent chance to increase the happiness by a lot so that they don't just walk out, which is mostly the same experience each time.

[ps051]

yes i have the same problem lol

[Maine's Own]

I second this

[Gloomster569]

yeppppppppppppp

[DoodNoodle]

It's just a balance mini game. You press happiness+ and happiness chance+ 3 times then you regen their patience(?). Then you repeat for need. The sincerity/mood tutorial existed prior to the name changes.

Quick tip though. You can just click the offer button at the start. it gives them a random amount of happiness and need. I did that until i got dedicated sales people. You won't hit it everytime but it's better than wasting time actually doing the mini -game when there is no one on register.

[Dohlar]

Tutorials will receive a major overhaul soon :) But basically

Happiness indicates the success chance of a sale. So it's an hit/miss situation.
If you succeed the sale, the Need indicates the impact of your sale. So the higher need the higher chance of them to do what you suggest in case of a successful sale :)

[Shane]

i have found your better off...

a) Improve the customers (happiness) or (needs) select which in accordance to both the lowest, and when applicable to the text/comment of the customer.

b) Always firstly clicking "improve conversation success rate"
then "improve impact of conversation" once/twice to increase it a little.

then, end conversation... and repeat the above

c) If the customer during stage (B) appears to have a reduced patience bar, then do (B) as normal but before you end conversation click "refill patience"



but if the conversation takes a turn for the worse, you can still save it, by altering the tactic to only click "improve impact of conversation" once, then "refill patience" until you get it back on track...

Note:
alone without a staff on the till .... its a time consuming thing if you ask me considering how rapid they get ticked off..

[Techno86]

Originally posted by JFRY:

I've found interacting with customers to be a bunch of unpleasant rapid clicking to increase the percent chance to increase the happiness by a lot so that they don't just walk out, which is mostly the same experience each time.

I mean, as a retail associate for going on 9 years, this sounds pretty accurate to real life....

[Dennis]

I think the key most new players don't get is that it is actually a series of conversations. When you get Happiness to 100% - It's only for that topic. Close it at 100% and reopen the happiness and you will see it's prob not near 100% now. It's a new topic. You made them happy about their first concern (price, color? whatever) and now are answering their concerns on their next question - and back to needs to bring that back up and back and forth until both are high.
TLDR: Keep going - don't' stop at the first 100% happiness you see. It's not done.

I do dislike the timing of the mini-game to the overall time scope of the day. I don't mind leaving it multi-step and not simple, but perhaps a time-dilation pop-out for the mini-game somehow? It should take 'some' time - but last night my wife counted 26 dings of sales from 2 registers as I frantically mashed buttons to try and do it quick.

I saw the tip in a diff thread about just rolling the dice and hitting complete without doing anything convo wise - Don't quit it with the "X" even if the customer says they have no interest. I get about 50% success rate on the 'no interest' convo's by only hitting the handshake button and saving lots of time. Get a Lot more customers in the door than I do if I look for just needy customers and spend time hitting buttons. Way more customers.

Edit - Game already has two toggle speeds. Perhaps add in a new 1/4 speed that is not a player choice, but kicks in when you enter a Conversation with a Customer?

[Seftak]

This would be a good thing yeah but for me quite frankly i just hit the deal button immediatly. I hate the minigame and can't afford wasting 4 hours on a single client who will probably not even buy anything in the end. I could have resuplied the entire store in the time it took me to talk to one person...

Also, who the hell asks to be convinced to buy a bottle of ketchup. Just buy the damn thing or don't, lady...

[Gloomster569]

I now just click super quick to get the bars at least half full each, a 100% happy bar doesn't mean theyll buy anything. gotta go fastttt

[Dennis]

Update after some testing last night. You absolutely get loads more customers just fast clicking the handshake and taking the random die roll. But after my one test, I'm interested if others see the same thing I think I'm seeing.

May have just been a random sample but it certainly felt like the more a potential customers had a 'need' this quick method never seems to work. I have far better success rate on the insta handshake convos the less interested they were.

I ended up actually closing the convo with the X if they had great or even some 'need'. wasn't worth the time for one customer. Even a near sure bet. I can do 3-4 quickies in that time. With far less frantic stress lol

[Seftak]

I don't exactly understand (at all actually...) how the game judges a customer final reaction to the "deal" button. I can max everything and it will then not always give me the result i was shown or have 2 empty bars then when hitting "deal" they get full. And then it depends a lot on the rng of the customer required success. You can have the bar up to 95% and the customer will require 98%... Or you hit deal and it required 5%.

[Dennis]

Originally posted by Seftak:

I don't exactly understand (at all actually...) how the game judges a customer final reaction to the "deal" button. I can max everything and it will then not always give me the result i was shown or have 2 empty bars then when hitting "deal" they get full. And then it depends a lot on the rng of the customer required success. You can have the bar up to 95% and the customer will require 98%... Or you hit deal and it required 5%.

I think this is the multiple convo part I was mentioning. A customer has multiple questions you need to satisfy for the end happiness number. When you get 100% happiness, close it and reopen happiness right away again. It's a new question you need to make them happy enough to raise their overall (end handshake) happiness. Repeat until out of time for max chance.

I never raise the 'Need'. Either it's high already, or it's low and I'm not playing the mini-game, just handshaking immediately.

[Seftak]

I guess it might be it. Or the game doesn't even take into consideration the minigame and just rng a hapiness level at the end and all the time wasted "convincing the customer" is useless...

Mostly because even if you end up with a good result the customer wil not even buy the item half the time so again you are better just handling the register or restocking the shelves.

[Dohlar]

To give a deeper explanation. All customers have certain desires for all articles. This is someting that can be influenced by your abilities to make a sale.

So if a customer says, "Not in a million years", the customer would never buy this item no matter how good you sell, as the customer has no desire for it at all. Imagine you trying to sell a Ferrari to a student (without rich parents)
Likewise, if it's "Perfect" they don't need any convincing at all as their desire is already at a high.

So the job is to find the ones that are on the edge and push them over. The better you sell, the better the chance of you pushing them over.

So as mentioned above:
- Happiness indicates the success chance of a sale, which is a hit/miss situation. Either the customer kind of accepts what you are saying, or not.
- if you succeed on your Happiness, the Need indicates how much you influence the customers desire.
The customer then afterwards makes of their mind whether they want to buy it or not. But your sale does have an impact.