Is the Customer Always Right? UM Study Finds Rude Customers Hurt Business
OXFORD, Miss. – According to a University of Mississippi press release, frontline employees who face rude or disrespectful customers are more likely to justify negative behaviors, from cutting corners to leaving their jobs, according to a new study.
Barry Babin, Phil B. Hardin Professor of Marketing and a University of Mississippi Distinguished Professor, and Mahmoud Darrat, associate professor of marketing at the University of Tampa, published their study on customer incivility in Services Marketing Quarterly.
“Repeated rude treatment wears employees down emotionally,” said Babin, who is also the chair of the Department of Marketing, Analytics, and Professional Sales in the School of Business Administration. “Once exhausted, some workers begin mentally reframing retaliation as justified. Moral disengagement is essentially the process of saying to yourself, ‘I’m not really doing anything wrong because I’ve been treated unfairly.’
“That mindset can then lead to behaviors like intentionally slowing service, disengaging from work, or planning to quit.”
Frontline workers – including servers, salespeople, front desk attendants, and fast-food workers – often deal directly with the public, where the phrase “the customer is always right” has become a mantra, Darrat said.
“The internet is just inundated with videos of altercations between customers and employees and misbehavior on both sides of the spectrum,” he said. “I wanted to understand what was spurring these retaliations by employees toward customers, and what the impact of this incivility is in the workplace.”
When customers are rude, the frontline employee can sometimes respond by becoming “checked out,” retaliating at that or another customer and, often, quitting.
“One negative interaction with a belligerent customer could negatively impact the next customer who’s not belligerent,” Darrat said. “This creates a toxic environment among employees.
“That’s really where the main issue comes in. It creates a toxic climate within the organization where the employees don’t want to be there and neither do the customers.”
These negative environments can contribute to burnout and turnover, making it difficult for the business to retain workers. Videos of negative customer interactions can hurt sales and tarnish the business’s reputation.
A manager’s natural inclination may be to support an employee after dealing with a rude customer, but the researchers found that this does not always help, Babin said.
“Supportive supervisors alone are not enough if employees are repeatedly exposed to hostility,” the Ole Miss professor said. “Companies may need to move from reactive support – comforting employees afterward – to proactive protection through clearer policies, training and organizational norms that communicate employees will not be expected to tolerate abuse.”
Instead, the researchers recommend that managers establish and enforce norms that employees must be treated with dignity and respect. This could include a written anti-harassment policy or creating protocols that tell employees what they should do if a customer becomes belligerent or uncivil.
Once a policy is established, it is important that managers and leaders strictly enforce it and step in when they notice a customer altercation.
“Make it clear to customers that it won’t be tolerated and that managers will not stand on the side of customers at the expense of their employees,” Darrat said. “This mantra of ‘The customer is always right’ has created entitlement among consumers that justifies in their minds that it’s OK to be rude and impolite.
“The only way to fix that is to show that it won’t be tolerated.”
