Encouraging Good Behavior from Your Customers

Customers interact with service employees daily: buying a coffee, taking an Uber, ordering meal delivery, eating in a restaurant, receiving technical support over the phone, or returning a product using online chat. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, reports on these interactions have shown a decrease in kindness and patience and an increase in incivility toward service employees: rude comments or behavior, refusing to follow instructions, attacks, verbal aggression including threats, and passive aggression, like an eye roll. Consumer-facing businesses have long lived by the maxim “the customer is always right.” But in the current environment, is that still true? And what responsibility do employers have to improve customer behavior toward their employees? These questions are timely because customer incivility is not a small problem affecting a niche segment of the global workforce. In the United States, for example, service jobs — whether in a traditional industry (airline, hotel, restaurant) or an emerging field (ride hailing, personal concierge, end-of-life doulas) — represent roughly 80% of total employment. Similarly, service work dominates other developed economies, accounting for 72% to 82% of total employment in countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Israel. With service work so prevalent and incivility on the rise, organizations must reframe how they view their customers. Our research — focusing on employee well-being and performance when facing abuse, unreasonable demands, or illegitimate complaints from customers — highlights why corporate cultures that emphasize putting customers first, regardless of bad behavior, are problematic. It also points to improved customer management strategies. In essence, organizations could treat them more like employees, developing strategies to better select, train, evaluate, discipline, and (in some cases) fire them. When “The Customer Is Always Right” Goes Wrong Successful retailers such as Harry Gordon Selfridge, John Wanamaker, and Marshall Field spearheaded the customer-is-king, service-with-a-smile approach to service more than a century ago, and for decades, many organizations across industries, including Hewlett-Packard, Ritz-Carlton, Walmart, and Sony adopted similar approaches. But this model is problematic for two key reasons. First, it can be damaging to both employees and the business. Workers suffer from the emotional toll of the encounter itself and then, if they push back or speak up, from the repercussions. These might include a bad post-encounter survey score and performance evaluation, a smaller tip, a reduced or less-preferred schedule, a managerial reprimand, or losing their job altogether. Days, months, or even years of being mistreated by a customer will cause employee engagement and performance to falter, resulting in lower customer satisfaction and increased customer and employee attrition. Second, “the customer is always right” neglects to consider how employee-customer interactions unfold in the real world. Frontline service work often involves coproduction — for example, when customers must know and explain their preferences (to a hairdresser, server, massage therapist, architect), provide account details (call-center interactions, financial transactions), and express their desired changes to products or settings (IT, cell phone, and television support). Even self-service actions (grocery store and other retail transactions, hotel and airline check-ins) are not completely free from interactions with frontline workers. Quality customer service requires both participants to provide input and collaborate. Customers, of course, are not actually employed by the organizations that they seek service from, so managers tend to overlook them as human capital that needs management. But if companies want to support better employee performance, then they must consider ways to improve customer performance via selection, training, evaluation, progressive discipline, and potentially dismissal. Learn to Manage Your Customers Several organizations are developing policies and procedures designed to proactively protect employees by promoting appropriate customer behavior. Here are some areas of focus. Selection. Recognize that not all customers are the right ones for your organization, especially ones who behave uncivilly toward employees. While large platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Google, for example) must engage with huge audiences, most smaller businesses and entrepreneurs do not. There are many examples of organizations and professionals that “select” their customers: law firms, architectural practices, consultancies, contractors, landscapers, and psychotherapy and physician offices. Among gig workers, Uber and meal-delivery drivers choose which jobs to take, and Airbnb hosts can decline service requests more directly. In smaller companies, selection can take the form of letting uncivil customers know that you are too busy to serve them or not taking new clients. You can also signal that your organization values frontline workers — and won’t tolerate their mistreatment — through product design and marketing, which will help you attract customers who will also adhere to that culture and those values. To be clear, your customer selection should never be driven by bias but by well-defined expectations for appropriate behavior toward employees. Training. Just as employees are taught proper procedures for taking an order or responding to a call, customers can be trained to understand acceptable behavior. For example, organizations are increasingly using signage to communicate expectations: The TSA posts signs at airport security checkpoints warning passengers of fines and criminal penalties for threats, verbal abuse, and physical violence against agents. In June 2022, a Dairy Queen restaurant posted a sign asking customers to be patient and respect their staff, reminding patrons that it is the first job many of them have held. At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Pharmacy Guild of Australia offered a downloadable poster to its members indicating a zero-tolerance approach toward aggressive and abusive behaviors against pharmacists. Other companies use technology to train customers. In Korea, some call centers ask customer service workers’ loved ones to record messages or ringback tones that are played before connecting customers to those employees. It is a reminder that the ensuing interaction will be with a real human being, and the intervention has significantly reduced the amount of verbal abuse customer service employees receive. Evaluation. Traditionally, only employees have been subject to manager and customer evaluations of their performance via reviews and surveys. However, service platforms such as Uber and Airbnb have shown that customers — that is, passengers and renters — can also be rated, and the results are made public. Drivers and hosts may then refuse customers with extremely low ratings or reviews that include accusations of abusive behaviors. These evaluations remind customers that their performance also matters. Formal and informal customer-behavior tracking also appears common in call centers and the restaurant industry. Regardless of how you evaluate your customers, providing service employees with the ability to indicate when an interaction with a customer has been problematic, and enabling them to take a break, is critical. Social support — whether from a peer, supervisor, or trainer — can go a long way in these situations as well. Progressive discipline and dismissal. Sometimes even the best selection, training, and evaluation methods cannot discourage uncivil customer behavior. While some employers demand that employees persist through horrible circumstances, others are adopting rules and tools that help employees protect themselves from customer mistreatment. Some call centers in Korea, for example, now have a “right to hang up” policy, which allows an employee, after two warnings, to end a phone call at their discretion when experiencing verbal abuse. This “right to hang up” is an example of progressive discipline, and organizations can empower their employees to use it in certain abusive customer interactions. Beyond warnings for verbal abuse from customers, some companies allow employees to escalate by making a note on a file, redirecting the interaction to a supervisor, and even issuing fines (depending on the industry). Ultimately, an organization can choose to end its relationship with an abusive customer. One prominent example is the zero-tolerance policy passed in the United States by the FAA in 2021 to discourage unruly customer behavior on airlines, which involved potential fines or jail time. Companies including Amazon, Chili’s, Facebook, Ferrari, JetBlue, Lululemon, McDonald’s, Sephora, Tim Hortons, Victoria’s Secret, and Wendy’s are also “firing” bad customers. While some ban people due to violations of company policies, terms of service, or user agreements, others do so at the discretion of the manager or owner for repeated uncivil behavior. How customers treat employees is being taken seriously by some governments as well. In 2022, for instance, the UK passed legislation that increased penalties for customers who abuse employees. . . . Clearly, the customer is not always right. Organizations that value their employees must protect and support them through their customer-service and workplace policies. Doing so starts with recognizing that customers are often coproducers of service and then using strategies adapted from human resource management to ensure customers behave more humanely. This approach will benefit your workforce and your business.

Encouraging Good Behavior from Your Customers

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