Delivering Non-verbal Cues in Virtual Meetings : A Qualitative Study of How to Alleviate Online Trust-building Dilemmas in Sales Meeting Context

Sammanfattning: This paper started by asking the core question of why trust-building is hard in virtual meetings. Theories about "what is trust?" are drawn from the literature on interpersonal trust and trust in the business and marketing academic field.   The sales meeting is the main observation object of this paper because it is a type of meeting that is more purpose-driven and certainly expected for economic relative output, compared with the other less-emergent daily meeting kinds. When many offline meetups are forced to be held online due to pandemic restrictions, the core of how to generate sales and manage customer relationships does not change much for a salesperson. It is commonly agreed by business meeting attendees that online trust-building is harder than it is in offline meetings. But what is missing from trust-building?   This study uses user experience researching methods to identify the missed cues of essential trust elements both online and offline. Compare the similarities and differences of key cues of trust-building between attendees in their virtual sales meeting experience and face-to-face sales meeting experience. Finally, a few subtle aiding tools are designed for compensating for what is missed in the online meeting.   This paper finds that it is not easy for attendees in virtual meeting being conscious and precise about which moment increases or decreases their trusting level towards counterparts. To trust a salesperson through online meeting requires a long and step by step process of building the trust, this process must expose a salesperson’s vulnerability and authenticity so can gradually trigger the happening in terms of trust. Design of applying visual cues can bring about the result of delivering eye gaze and listening status feedback in online meeting.   The method is using qualitative study process includes organizing observations online and on-site for sales meetings. Analyze the user experience through studying on the recordings of the meetings. The theories and empirical findings are combined to produce logical conjectures, which leads to ideation and design work.