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.
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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