When and how to call customers by name

This insight is brought to you by… Modash

Stuck on campaign ideas? One way to lighten the load is to learn from the best and get inspired by what’s already working.

Modash has rounded up 17 high-performing influencer campaigns in a free guide, complete with performance stats and key takeaways from brands like:

👉 Victoria’s Secret
👉 Birkenstock
👉 Sennheiser

Ready to discover the tactics behind standout campaigns?

Want to sponsor Science Says? Here’s all you need to know.

📝 Context

Topic: Customer Experience | Sales
For: B2C
Research date: April 2026
Universities: Monash University

We’ve talked in the past about the importance of personalizing customer service, humanizing your front-facing employees and making your customers feel like they matter, and aren’t just a number. 

But when was the last time you were addressed by name when receiving a service?

The science says calling customers by name does improve the experience, as long as you can make sure they don’t feel embarrassed or manipulated.

P.S.: Making a customer’s experience feel personalized (e.g. sending a handwritten thank you note with an invoice or highlighting an option specifically for them in a brochure) can increase satisfaction and sales.

📈 Recommendation

Encourage your employees to call customers by their names when interacting with them. 

Train them to use it naturally when talking to customers (e.g. “What would you like to order today Mr. Smith?”) and make sure names aren’t used in a scripted or repetitive way (e.g. using the name in every sentence ), so the interaction feels genuine. Avoid using customer names in embarrassing or uncomfortable situations (e.g. at a pharmacy or a doctor’s clinic).

People will spend more and be more satisfied with the service.

🎓 Findings

• People spend more, are more likely to accept upsell offers, and are more satisfied with their experience when service employees refer to them by name.

• As part of an experiment at a suburban Australian restaurant and 3 online experiments, researchers found that when customers were addressed by their name:

  • Average spending per person increased 17.3% (from $28.67 to $33.64).

  • Upsell offers were accepted more than twice as often (from 22.6% to 48.4%).

  • Customer satisfaction was 15.9% higher.

• People were 17.2% more likely to accept an upsell request when their name was randomly used during the interaction with a waitress (vs not at all), but not when their name was used immediately alongside the upsell offer.

• The effect:

  • Strengthens when employees introduce themselves by name before asking for the customer’s name

  • Reverses if the name is used in an embarrassing situation (e.g. at a pharmacy seeking hemorrhoid cream)

  • Reverses if the name is used too often. Compared to not using a customer’s name at all, using it in every other sentence increased customer satisfaction by 9.1%, but using it in every sentence canceled out this effect and caused discomfort

🧠 Why it works

• When a service employee uses our name, like at Starbucks, we feel more valued as a human being, instead of just a source of revenue. 

• This builds rapport between us and the employee, making us happier with their work and more open to their suggestions. That’s similar to how we tip more if we exchange names with our waiter and address each other by name.

• When the use of our name feels forced, unnatural or like it’s being used to upsell to us, that breaks this rapport.

• If our name is used during an embarrassing situation, or when we’d prefer privacy (e.g. buying medicines for an STD) that makes us uncomfortable and destroys the benefits.

Want to advertise to 30,000+ Science Says readers here? Click here.

✋ Limitations

• The study looked at the people in the US, UK and Australia. It’s possible that in other cultures, customers might appreciate formality or social distance and prefer not to be called by name.

• The research didn’t differentiate between addressing people by first name or family names with a title (e.g. Mr. Smith). It’s likely that people might react differently to being addressed in different ways (e.g. it may feel forced to a college student to be referred to as Mr. Smith, while an elderly man may not appreciate a teenage waiter calling him “John”). Similarly, for some settings (e.g. a bank or luxury store) more formal titles might be more appropriate.

• It’s unknown whether addressing repeat or regular customers by their name would continue to result in increased satisfaction and spending or whether the effect would diminish after repeated interactions.

• The study included a field experiment and online experiments where people looked at online scripts of a conversation. It wasn’t tested, but it is possible that this means the effect would carry over to using someone’s name in online support chats as well.

👀 Real-life example

Qatar Airways cabin crew often address customers in their premium cabins by name during their time onboard.

❌ Issue: Cabin crew welcome premium customers by name, but often use the name in a formal, forced manner.

✅ Solution: Qatar Airways can further increase customer satisfaction by:

• Ensuring cabin crew introduce themselves to customers in premium cabins.

• Training cabin crew to ask younger customers whether they prefer to be referred to by first name, to make the use of their last name seem less forced.

• Making customer experiences memorable by adapting customer service based on the purpose of a traveller’s journey (e.g. giving champagne to couples flying together, giving a notebook or pen for business travellers to use in meetings at their destination).

• Apologize for trivial issues that are beyond the control of the cabin crew (e.g. “sorry for the long walk to the gate”) to come across as more warm and increase engagement.

🔍 Study type

Online experiments and field experiment (sales and upselling behavior at 127 tables of a suburban restaurant of a major Australian city).

📖 Research

Call me by my name: The effects of addressing customers by their names, the underlying mechanisms, and the boundary conditions. Journal of Retailing (April 2026). 

🏫 Researchers

• Sri Vishnu Srinivasa Raja. Monash University.

• Yimin Cheng. Monash University.

• Tracey S. Danaher. Monash University.

Remember: This is a new scientific discovery. In the future it will probably be better understood and could even be proven wrong (that’s how science works). It may also not be generalizable to your situation. If it’s a risky change, always test it on a small scale before rolling it out widely.

🎁 Bonus trivia

Here is how else Science Says can help your marketing:

• 📈 Join the Science Says Platform to unlock all 300+ insights, real-world case studies, and exclusive playbooks

• 📘 Boost your sales and profits with topic-specific Science-based Playbooks (e.g. Pricing, Ecommerce, SaaS, AI Best Practices)

• 🔬 Get science-based thought leadership content for your brand. We help market leaders in AI, tech, and across B2B enterprises, build authoritative thought leadership using a scientific perspective. Find out more.

🎓 It took me, a PhD analyst, and a marketing pro 11.5 hours to accurately turn this 17-page research paper into this 3min insight. 

If you enjoyed it please share it with a friend, or share it on LinkedIn and tag me (Thomas McKinlay), I’d love to engage and amplify! 

If this was forwarded by a friend you can subscribe below for $0 👇