Your Conversion Metrics Are Lying to You—Here’s What Actually Drives Growth
What I learned about customer loyalty through people-watching.
This article by Ames Chester, founder and Chief Executive Officer of WVN, was originally published on Inc.com.
I spend a lot of time working in public spaces: airports, hotel lobbies, coffee shops, and third-spacey storefronts.
Basically, anywhere with good WiFi and good vibes.
Years ago, as an architectural engineer turned experiential technologist, I got into the habit of observing the way people entered environments. If you sit still long enough (and minimize Slack), patterns emerge.
People often reveal intent and emotion as they enter a space.
It’s in the shoulders and in the rhythm of their steps. You see it the moment their eyes either rise with curiosity or drop with uncertainty. In a coffee shop, I can usually tell who is settling in and who is preparing to leave before they even take a seat. In a retail store, you can see who plans to browse and who is already halfway out the door.
I can typically spot the regulars, the tourists, and the enthusiasts within the first few steps.
Not surprisingly, behavioral science has been documenting these cues for decades. People frequently form impressions of both built and natural environments within seconds of entering, and these immediate impressions influence emotional states and psychological responses like happiness, stress, attention and well-being.
Yet most commercial spaces are still designed around that single moment of conversion.
It is the data point anchoring forecasts, reports, and performance reviews, but the moments surrounding conversion reveal far more about satisfaction, loyalty, and long-term growth than the transaction itself ever could.
If you are primarily focused on the moment of sale, you are watching success through the rearview mirror. Relationships drive the car. It turns out, everyone is actually in the hospitality business, whether they know it or not.
The Old Model Is Breaking
For years, companies optimized for the transaction. The sale. The signup. The funnel step could be isolated and improved.
I spent nearly a decade inside marketing technology, where conversion was the holy metric. Attribution models work reasonably well online, but once you step into physical environments, the methodology collapses.
Years ago, I shifted from digital into experiential work. The more time I spent building real-world brand experiences, the clearer it became that transaction and commitment were both pivotal to operational intelligence, yet only one of them was consistently measured.
The uncomfortable truth most brands avoid is that conversion is a lagging indicator, yet we still treat it like a steering wheel. By the time a transaction shows up in a report, the most important decisions have already been made by the customer: stay or leave, trust or doubt, lean in or pull back. Conversion confirms a decision that was locked in long before money changed hands.
This is why so many brands feel stuck despite healthy conversion data. The dashboards look fine while loyalty erodes, acquisition costs rise, and returns increase. Teams keep optimizing downstream metrics while missing the upstream signals that actually shape behavior. In real-world environments, especially, conversion is more akin to an autopsy report than a growth lever.
Research supports this pattern clearly.
Studies published in the Annual Review of Psychology show that trust and preference are often established before conscious evaluation and Cornell’s SC Johnson College of Business has shown that check-in experience quality is a strong predictor of guest satisfaction. In retail environments where consumers increasingly demand extraordinary and engaging experiences, the quality of the customer experience not only enhances the time shoppers spend in a store but also drives higher purchase amounts and builds long-term loyalty, making experience quality a central driver of sales and customer lifetime value.
The visible moment we call conversion is simply the endpoint of a relational process that started much earlier.
The Cultural Backdrop Has Shifted
This shift is happening as demand for positive in-person connection has intensified.
People are increasingly searching for belonging and emotional grounding in their surroundings. McKinsey’s consumer research finds that modern customers gravitate toward brands that make them feel understood in a chaotic world.
In this context, any brand still anchored to conversion thinking is operating with an outdated mental model. Physical experiences now function as modern town squares. They are places where people decide whether connection feels possible.
The Relationship Is Visible At The Threshold
Every IRL experience reveals the relationship long before money changes hands.
You see it at the store entrance, the stadium gate, the hotel lobby and the fitness studio doorway.
Lighting, sound and spatial cues can influence emotional state within seconds. Anthropologist Victor Turner described thresholds as liminal spaces that shape how people interpret what comes next. NIH research shows that early movement patterns, gaze direction and hesitation predict downstream engagement.
If you pay attention to threshold behavior, you see everything you need to know. A relationship is either forming or it is not and the transaction only confirms or denies it.
A New Definition Of Retail
Retail has traditionally been defined narrowly as the selling of goods in stores. For brands that understand conversion as one data point within a broader relational context, retail can and should be redefined as any moment in which a human decides whether or not to move closer.
That is the moment worth tracking. That is the moment worth optimizing. When companies ignore it, they end up perfecting the wrong part of the journey.
What Leaders Need To Do Now
Leaders should stop trying to repair conversion moments and start cultivating relationship environments. When this is done well, transactions follow naturally.
- Identify your relational entry points. Where do people cross into your world? What emotional state do they bring with them?
- Redesign the first 30 seconds. Behavioral science is clear. Early impressions anchor the entire experience.
- Observe behavior instead of assuming sentiment. Pace, posture, hesitation and gaze reveal the truth.
- Treat environments as emotional systems, not operational ones. Design for connection, clarity and belonging. Treat entry, presence and exit with equal intention.
- Measure the relationship, not just the transaction. This is where most organizations miss the story.
If your dashboard cannot explain why people hesitate, linger, or turn away, it is not showing you how growth actually happens.
Long Live The Relationship
The business world has spent decades chasing conversion, but the companies that will lead the next decade will chase something deeper: they will recognize that the most important part of the customer journey lives in the relationship formed just in front of and beyond the sale.
Your conversions are lying to you about what matters most. Growth follows the relationship you build long before the sale.
