The Abusive Customer

Breaking the silence around an all-too-common problem, this book offers insights into the triggers of customer aggression against service employees, explores its consequences, and provides practical advice for handling abusive customers and mitigating the damage they inflict. Today, more than half of the world’s population is employed in the service sector. This fundamental economic shift is accompanied by heightened attention to customer service and the ‘customer is always right’ paradigm. But when customers act aggressively, everyone pays a price: frontline employees, their families, their companies, and even the abusive customers themselves. Unlike breezier titles on the subject, this book is based in academic research—exploring the ‘why?’ and ‘when?’ behind abusive behavior—that underpins its practical approach, illustrated with real-world stories from professionals on the front lines of customer service. The book’s useful tools include a sample anti-customer abuse policy and management process, a cheat sheet of practices that work for handling its consequences, a summary of effective service recovery processes and practices, and abuse-handling training list and curriculum templates. Managers and workers in customer-facing roles, in industries such as retail, hospitality, tourism, banking, and contact centers, will welcome this essential resource as part of their efforts to stop aggressive customer behavior, and improve employee morale, job satisfaction, and engagement.