Front-line Service Personnel’s Stress-level in Demanding Customer Encounters

Marko Mäki, Teemu Kokko
(HAAGA-HELIA–University of Applied Sciences, Helsinki, Finland)

Abstract: This exploratory and cross-disciplinary article focuses on front-line service personnel’s stress level in demanding customer encounters. There is strong evidence that an increasing number of service areas need to cope with challenging customer groups. However, the existing marketing literature does not really provide tools for coping with the challenging customer encounters. This study approaches the topic through a semi-medical research setting. 40 respondents from two service companies were recruited for the study. They completed a survey dealing with the perceived stress, perceptions about customer service in general, and coping strategies when confronting demanding customer encounters. The respondents’ stress-level was medically measured by checking the Cortisol hormone (“stress hormone”) levels. The major findings indicate that strongly structured duties at work increase the perceived stress but medically the hormone levels in those cases tend to be lower. Further, empowerment in service situations does not seem to be the way to decrease stress. Finally, getting quickly over a stressful situation seems to lower the perceived stress-level, but not the stress-hormone level. The authors suggest that a new critical look at empowerment as a concept should be taken. The study as a whole underlines the importance of analyzing demanding customer encounters both through perceptions and through medical analysis in order to capture short and long-term implications. Managerially the findings help us to develop new techniques to confront demanding customers. More research is needed and the authors suggest a before-after setting in order to find out the effectiveness of different interpersonal techniques as means of lowering the front-line service personnel stress-levels.

Key words: service; service personnel; stress; service encounter; demanding customers

JEL code: M30