Dealing with difficult customers? Taking a few minutes to reflect on your day may help

Employees in customer service industries often face hostility in their work environments. When interacting with the public, customers can be rude or demanding.

In recent years, the public has grown increasingly toxic and sometimes dangerous. If a customer yells or threatens an employee, that interaction on its own is jarring. But when these incidents accumulate over months and years, the mental health toll grows.

Our recent research found there are tactics individual employees can use to improve their own work experience.

The study — co-authored with research psychologist William P. Jimenez of the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences — focused on taxi drivers, who are often on the front lines of customer interactions, work long hours and perform a great deal of emotional labour.

Difficult customers take a toll

As people become exhausted with their jobs, burnout rates can skyrocket with no relief in sight.

Across studies of customer-facing employees, we have found that difficult customer interactions increase burnout, elicit rule-breaking behaviours and influence whether workers want to remain in their occupation.

Employees have little recourse to improve their situations. Those working in customer service industries are especially vulnerable because the workforce is disproportionately made up of young people, women, racialized workers and people in precarious socioeconomic positions.

Compared with workers who hold greater social and economic power, they may have fewer alternative employment options and less ability to challenge unfair treatment. Because they depend on these jobs, they may feel compelled to tolerate conditions that more privileged workers could afford to leave.

Responsibility for fixing this sits clearly with employers, who have tools such as customer conduct policies and managerial support to reduce how often these situations happen. What we studied is whether, in the event a difficult interaction happens anyway, an employee can do something in the moment.

We tend to forget the good things

In our study, we adapted a “three good things” intervention that had employees engage in a positive work reflection looking back at three positive events from their day, to see how this impacts their behaviour at work (one of the only things they can control).

As people, we tend to forget the positive things that happened to us throughout our day, ruminating instead on things that went wrong or situations that upset us. These instances evoke stronger and more immediate physiological, cognitive and behavioural responses.

But this means it’s also something we can intervene to correct. What we focus on determines much of how we feel, so if we choose to look back on our workday searching for instances of goodness and reflecting on what we like about our jobs, we’re more likely to feel better about the work we do and we will, in turn, feel more satisfaction and do better at it.

By focusing on three good things, we found that small, specific occurrences were the best way to prompt people to think differently about their workday. These could be as small as making progress towards a goal, receiving positive feedback, being offered a new opportunity or having a pleasant interaction.

In reflecting on instances like these, employees in customer-facing industries were empowered to process positive experiences more fully. These reflections can change how people feel about their workday, which in turn influences how they behave at work. If people feel better about their jobs, they do better at them.

What our study found

We found that taxi drivers who naturally focus on opportunities, growth and achieving their goals had more success with the intervention overall.

Reflecting on positive experiences increased employees’ positive emotions and significantly increased their extra-role service behaviour, while reducing rule-breaking behaviours. Drivers went above and beyond to ensure a positive experience for customers, and avoided actions that could impede that experience, like driving aggressively.

The intervention also enhanced employees’ active responses to unreasonable demands from entitled customers. They were better able to understand the reasoning behind a demand, explain why accommodating it was impossible, or express understanding of a customer’s frustration.

Because customer-facing employees often have limited control over how customers behave, interventions like this focus on one thing employees can control: how they process and reflect on their work experiences.

A tool for employees and managers alike

While organizations are increasingly implementing measures to encourage respectful customer behaviour, this kind of individual reflection isn’t a replacement for that structural work. It’s something workers can do in the meantime, while broader protections catch up.

Our findings suggest that taking a few minutes at the end of the workday to reflect on three positive experiences is one simple, evidence-based way to do so.

Our research focuses on a bottom-up approach, in which employees take the initiative, but the deeper fix has to come from employers: setting clear boundaries with abusive customers, staffing shifts adequately and stepping in when interactions turn hostile.

A reflection exercise can help someone get through a bad day. It can’t substitute for a workplace that works harder to prevent bad days in the first place.

Mary Margaret Licharson, Senior Lead for Research Facilitation and Mobilization at the Asper School of Business, University of Manitoba, co-authored this article.