Service and Experience with J. N. Halm: Crossfire!: Dealing with rude customers and difficult bosses

By J. N. Halm

If bubbly were a personality type, she definitely would have been the icon for that trait. From the very first day she entered the office, she just “took over” the place.

True, she seemed “all over the place”, but it was in the most positive way possible. She was, what I will describe as, “a bother without being a bother.” She always had that smile on her face, with a touch of naughtiness in her eyes.

She was really the life of the office. What made her even more adorable was her attitude towards work. She was hardworking. And in my experience, that was a rare mix. Joviality and industry are not often seen together. But she had that combination.

It was therefore very disheartening to see her that day at lunch in that sombre mood. It was so unlike her. When she opened up about how the day had gone that morning, I felt her pain. She said her day had started just as it usually did. But for some reason, that day, the manager did not seem to be in the best of moods.

According to her, she had received a sharp and unnecessary reprimand from our manager over a very minor issue. It obviously had come as a surprise to her. But she had taken it in her stride. She said what even hurt her more was that the “blasting” had been delivered in front of some of our colleagues. She had said nothing in response and carried on with her morning.

However, the first customer she encountered that day made her day worse. A customer she had dealt with had made a remark that had cut her to the heart. All she had asked was for him to fill out a form well. That was all.

But that made the customer flare up and made some unsavoury remarks about them. And just like in the case of our manager, she smiled and said nothing in return. But that day, you could see the episode with her boss and her customer had really gotten to her.

Two pressures. Two sources of emotional strain. And one human being asked to perform warmth and professionalism as though neither had happened. If you have ever worked at the front line of a service operation, some version of this story will feel entirely familiar.

And if you have never worked at the front line, I would invite you to sit with it for a moment before we proceed, because what a study published in the September 2025 edition of the Journal of Service Theory and Practice is now telling us is that this combination of pressures is not merely uncomfortable. It is, in a precise and measurable sense, damaging.

The research, titled “Customer Incivility and Emotional Labor from the Perspective of the Transactional Model of Stress: Mediation of Customer Orientation and Moderation of Interpersonal Conflict,” examined 222 flight attendants working for a South Korean airline.

The study explored the relationship between customer incivility—the experience of being treated rudely or disrespectfully by customers—and emotional labour, which is the effort required to manage and display emotions in ways that align with organisational expectations.

The study draws on the transactional model of stress, a framework that understands stress not as a fixed property of a situation but as the product of an individual’s appraisal of that situation relative to their available resources.

In plain terms, stress is what happens when demands exceed capacity. And what this research is charting, with considerable care, is the precise way that two different demands—external rudeness from customers and internal conflict with supervisors—combine to overwhelm the capacity of even the most committed frontline employee.

The first finding is not entirely surprising, though it is important. Higher levels of customer incivility were associated with lower customer orientation. Customer orientation, as I have discussed in this column before, is that genuine predisposition to prioritise the customer’s well-being—the inner compass that points an employee towards helpfulness and care. It is not simply a mood or a momentary inclination. It is a motivational state, a professional identity, a deep-seated commitment to doing right by the person being served.

And the research now shows that sustained exposure to customer incivility erodes this very important resource. The employee who is repeatedly treated with disrespect does not simply have bad days. Over time, their fundamental orientation towards the customer begins to shift. The care that came naturally starts to require effort. And eventually, even the effort begins to wane.

The second finding concerns deep acting—one of the two primary forms of emotional labour identified in service research. Surface acting is the performance of the required emotion without feeling it internally: the smile worn like a mask. Deep acting is something far more demanding and far more genuine: the internal effort to actually generate the feelings one is required to display, to truly care, to truly engage, to truly be present for the person in front of you.

Deep acting is, in short, what great service actually looks and feels like. And the study found that customer incivility reduces this too, significantly. The employees most exposed to rude customers were the least able to do the deeper, more authentic emotional work that distinguishes exceptional service from mere compliance.

As a matter of fact, these two findings alone carry serious implications for how service businesses manage and protect their frontline teams. But it is the third finding—the moderating role of supervisory conflict—that strikes me as the most urgent and the most overlooked.

The study found that interpersonal conflict with one’s supervisor exacerbates the negative effects of customer incivility. In other words, the flight attendant who has had a difficult encounter with a rude passenger suffers more—loses more customer orientation, engages in less deep acting—if she is also in conflict with her supervisor, than if her supervisory relationship is sound and supportive.

This is a finding that deserves to be read slowly and carefully by every manager who oversees a frontline team. The supervisor, in this research, is not a neutral factor. Their relationship with the employee is not background noise. It is, in fact, a resource—or the absence of one.

When the customer is unkind, and the supervisor is difficult, the employee faces two draining forces simultaneously and has access to none of the internal or interpersonal resources that might help them absorb the impact of either. They are, quite literally, caught in the crossfire. And the service they deliver to the next customer—and the one after that—reflects the toll of that position.

Experts have spent a great deal of time examining the customer side of the service encounter and comparatively little time examining the full internal environment in which the frontline employee operates. We talk extensively about what customers do and how employees should respond to it.

We talk far less about what supervisors do and how that shapes the employee’s capacity to serve. The aforementioned study begins to correct that imbalance, and the correction is long overdue.

The transactional model of stress, which underpins the research, offers a useful lens here. It reminds us that the same external event—an impatient customer, a sharp word from a customer—will land very differently depending on the resources the employee has available to process it. An employee who feels supported by her supervisor, trusted by her organisation, and secure in her professional relationships is not immune to customer incivility.

But she has a buffer. She has something to draw on. The rude customer is an unpleasant episode, not a defining one. The employee who carries supervisory conflict alongside the memory of that rude customer has no such buffer. Every subsequent stressor lands on ground that is already destabilised.

One can only imagine the scale of this problem across the global service industry. Flight attendants, hotel staff, bank tellers, retail workers, call centre employees—the ranks of the frontline are enormous, and the conditions under which they work are frequently characterised by exactly this double exposure: demanding customers on one side and imperfect organisational relationships on the other.

The businesses that treat these two challenges as separate problems—one to be solved through customer service training and the other through HR policy—are missing the central insight of this research. The two challenges interact. They compound each other. And the employee absorbs the full weight of that compounding.

The practical responses available to managers are, in truth, neither complex nor expensive. Supervisors who maintain respectful, supportive relationships with their teams are not merely pleasant to work for. They are, according to this research, actively protecting the customer orientation and deep acting capacity of the employees under their care. A culture in which supervisory relationships are fair, transparent, and psychologically safe is not a nicety. It is a service quality intervention. It is, ultimately, a customer experience decision.

The customer at the front of the queue sees only the employee in front of them. They do not see the reprimand delivered an hour earlier in the staff room. They do not see the unresolved tension that the employee brings to the frontline. But they feel its effects—in the quality of the smile, in the depth of the engagement, in the presence or absence of the genuine care that makes the difference between service that satisfies and service that merely suffices.

How you treat the people who serve your customers is, in the end, how your customers get treated. The chain of care begins well before the customer ever arrives.

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