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.
Ryan Snook
Encouraging Good Behavior from Your Customers
Select, train, evaluate — and sometimes fire — people who are rude to your employees.
November 09, 2022
· Long read
Summary.
Most companies plan how they manage employees, but how many consider how to manage their customers? Given how important customer-employee relationships are to business, and amid rising reports of customer incivility toward the frontline workforce, organizations are taking a page from people management and learning how to better select, train, evaluate, discipline — and even sometimes fire — customers.
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