Customer mistreatment towards customer service employees is a problem both for the employee and the organisation. There is substantial evidence that it leads to employee burn-out, emotional distress and absenteeism. Changing such customer behaviour is difficult if not impossible. But new research shows that companies may be able to help their employees cope better when they encounter mistreatment.
Yaping Gong, Lisa E. Baranik, Mo Wang and Junqi Shi argue that the ill effects on employees are amplified by cognitive rumination – thinking a lot about what has happened long after the mistreatment event – and “social sharing” about the event with partners, family, friends and colleagues, which is also a form of rumination. They draw on extensive post research about the negative effects of these responses to show how they can prolong the pain of customer mistreatment in a study of 737 call-centre employees in China.
“Although individuals often report that ruminating helps them to gain insight into their problems, understand why difficult situations have happened and make sense of a negative memory, the actual effect of rumination is often negative. Past research suggests that chronic rumination may lead to health problems, cognitive impairment that impedes job performance, and thoughts of aggression that can be linked to employee sabotage,” they said.
The authors provide empirical support for these ideas in their study, which looked specifically at how cognitive rumination and social sharing in response to customer mistreatment affected employee well-being, emotional exhaustion, job performance, and customer sabotage.
In particular, when employees engaged in cognitive rumination on customer mistreatment, this led to lower levels of well-being, more customer-directed sabotage (such as hanging up on a customer), higher emotional exhaustion, and lower job performance ratings. Social sharing had a more complex result: it was not linked to customer-directed sabotage or job performance, but it was positively related to both well-being and emotional exhaustion.
“This pattern is counterintuitive. One possible explanation may be that social sharing helps employees feel closer to others and make sense of the situation, but at the same time also drains them of valuable emotional resources by repeatedly triggering negative emotions and thus depleting the employee’s emotional reservoir. In sum, social sharing may be a double-edged sword,” the authors said.
They also looked at how employees coped with customer mistreatment in the moment and how this affected cognitive rumination and social sharing. Employees could engage in “surface acting” by putting on fake expressions even though this was not how they felt. Or they could engage in “deep acting” in which they tried to see things from the customer’s perspective and modify their emotions accordingly. The latter would, obviously, result in less rumination.
The results of the study showed that while deep acting reduced rumination arising from customer mistreatment, surface acting did not. “This unexpected null funding may have been due to a combined effect of employees partially achieving their goals – that is, meeting company display rules – which cancelled out the potential negative effects of surface acting,” they said.
The authors suggested companies could help employees overcome the negative effects of cognitive rumination and social sharing of negative events by training them to recognise when they are engaging in these activities and helping them to develop deep-acting skills. Mindfulness-based stress reduction training, as well as training that teaches employees to distract themselves by taking a short break, switching work tasks or engaging in other thoughts, could also help to break the cycle of rumination.
“By training customer service employees to recognise why customers may be verbally aggressive or unable to clearly communicate what they need, employees may feel less negative emotions and may perceive these interactions in a less personal manner,” they said. “We encourage managers to allow customer services employees some flexibility so they are able to take such breaks when needed.”