Executive summary and implications for managers and executives

Citation

(2010), "Executive summary and implications for managers and executives", Journal of Services Marketing, Vol. 24 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/jsm.2010.07524faf.001

Executive summary and implications for managers and executives

Article Type: Executive summary and implications for managers and executives From: Journal of Services Marketing, Volume 24, Issue 6

This summary has been provided to allow managers and executives a rapid appreciation of the content of this issue. Those with a particular interest in the topic covered may then read the issue in toto to take advantage of the more comprehensive description of the research undertaken and its results to get the full benefit of the material present.

David and Goliath are a twosome often brought to mind when, on the one side, is a large and powerful organization and, on the other, a customer who has had a raw deal and struggles to get satisfaction – be it repair, recompense or apology. There are TV programs, magazines and newspaper articles dedicated to evening up the odds by getting behind the disgruntled customers in taking on the might of the company which has behaved badly and which does not accept for a minute that the customer is ever, never mind always, right.

But what of the organization which finds itself at the receiving end of badly-behaving customers? Who is going to protect the goods or service provider which finds itself subject to the dark side of malevolent, opportunistic, illegal, fraudulent (and sometimes merely stupid or mistaken) activities of the customer? Customers behaving badly is commonplace and the smiling, contented customers portrayed in promotional material, being served by cheerful employees, is a scene divorced from reality. Some customers persist in deviating from organizational or societal rules and norms. For example, it is hardly within the rules and certainly not what is expected as “normal” behavior to go shopping for a lovely dress, buy it, wear it, and take it back the next day to be exchanged or refunded. Yet people do just that – and some even boast to their friends as if they have done something clever rather than something dishonest.

Similarly, there are people who have been involved in a minor automobile accident who pretend to have “whiplash” or some other injury which doctors or insurers find it difficult to refute. A “compensation culture” prompts people to take out insurance claims against companies for mishaps which, in a fairer society, would be considered their own fault. It is the same culture in which people can openly boast of their tax evasion, making or watching pirate copies of movies, making inflated insurance claims, and illegally downloading music. Others insist on smoking in restaurants and bars where it is not permitted, talking loudly in the cinema or theater, allowing their music to annoy other passengers on public transport, and stealing anything from a hotel towel to an organization’s intellectual property. Prevalent, although perhaps not boasted about or admitted, is shoplifting. And some customers do not even consider it fraudulent to avoid paying for a ticket on a bus or a train.

When you see organizations’ marketing campaigns you get the feeling they actually think their customers are ethical sort of folk. We have in mind those who choose “green” products rather than those which might harm the planet, who demand less packaging and the opportunity to recycle. Are these customers the same people who are content to make false claims for seniors’ or children’s discounts, try to rip off their insurers, who do not admit to cashiers that they have accidentally been given too much change, and who lie to stores about prices they have seen in competitor’s shops in order to get a better deal?

Then there are the people who blatantly exploit companies’ compensation practices by writing letters of complaint when they have really nothing to complain about. Those who ignore “how to take care of your product” instructions and blame the seller when something goes wrong, and those who merely refuse to even try the expensive automated self-service equipment which many organizations – supermarkets for example – have installed to avoid them having to queue at tills. There are those who vent their anger and frustration at perceived poor service via the burgeoning number of online forums – for word-of-mouth read word-of-web. Online dysfunctional behavior can vary widely from low ratings and non-recommendations to voicing switching intentions to even stronger forms such as manipulation of others and revenge intentions.

We must not forget the cynical customer who, far from setting off on a visit to retail stores with expectations of having a thoroughly good time, actually expects some sort of “run-in” with someone on the staff. The list of abysmal behavior by customers is seemingly endless.

Customers sure have a dark side and it is time to shed some light on it. Focusing on what they term the dysfunctional behavior of customers, in “Customers behaving badly: a state of the art review, research agenda and implications for practitioners”, Ray Fisk et al. say practitioners should:

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  Know their customer (e.g. What are their expectations/perceptions? What is driving them?).

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  Not try to be all things to all people (e.g. think twice before growing the business by attracting new customers whose expectations may be incompatible with those of existing customers).

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  Communicate (or negotiate?) the service organization’s expectations of customer behavior to (or with) customers in order to shape customers’ expectations of (un)acceptable behaviors.

For example, one (of many possible) defences customers might offer for their misbehavior is that they did not know the rules or standards of behavior. Another possible defence is that they knew the rules but did not agree with them. In both cases (and perhaps others), the rules were imposed upon them. When behavioral expectations are imposed on customers, they may feel little commitment to abide by them and subsequently may resent any sort of penalty or effort by the company to enforce the rules. Conflict, bitter feelings, and a host of undesirable behaviors may result. People are most committed to plans, rules, and goals if they participate in their formation. Buyers are more committed to buying decisions that they reach, rather than those forced upon them by others in the organization or, even worse, by arm-twisting high-pressure salespeople.

It follows that service customers are more likely to follow the “rules” (i.e. behavioral expectations) if they know what they are and ideally have a say in them (given that some rules may be negotiated). Service organizations might take steps toward this by explaining, and even promoting, the rules in straightforward language (i.e. not legalese hidden in piles of fine print), explaining the logic behind the rules (e.g. safety, fairness for all customers, operational efficiency to keep prices low), directly asking customer to commit to the rules (e.g. by signing customer charters), providing incentives or rewards for customers who consistently abide by the rules, and so on.

Service managers and frontline workers are in a unique position to study and track episodes of dysfunctional customer behavior. Such insights may be garnered using multiple methods. For example, implementing observation and complaint feedback systems that foster not only the habitual reporting and recording of incidents of misbehavior by customers, but also the ability to identify and track re-offenders, represents an indispensable managerial tool to understand the forms and patterns of misbehavior that occur within individual service settings.

In addition, a service manager’s direct access to the point of service delivery and physical contact enables them to benefit from their closeness to both the customer and employee. Consequently, managers may wish to investigate incidents of customer misbehavior by engaging a dyadic viewpoint and utilizing the perspectives of both customers and employees while recording the servicescape variables impacting individual incidents of customer deviance. Such incidents offer service managers a unique and detailed picture of the dynamics of dysfunctional customer behavior within their individual servicescape.

Once they have established an understanding of dysfunctional customer behavior, service managers can choose to respond to future acts of deviance in either a reactive or proactive manner. Service organizations are typically defensive in their approach in that they aim to control consumers and prevent or reduce their dysfunctional behavior. This approach assumes that the responsibility for behavior change lies with the consumer. An alternative, proactive approach might involve managers recognizing the emotional and cognitive cues that foreshadow dysfunctional behavior and using this information as feedback for service system changes.

Many customers can be a real pain in the neck perhaps without intending to. For instance the “accidental misuse” of resources when customers are involved in the innovation process. In “Not always co-creation: introducing interactional co-destruction of value in service-dominant logic” Loïc Plé and Rubén Chumpitaz Cáceres introduce the notion of “value co-destruction” in S-D logic, giving these examples:

The first refers to the increasingly common process of involving customers in innovation. Although such “co-innovation” has been promoted as an efficient method for achieving innovation, the results can be disappointing because customers have limited knowledge about new technologies/materials and are therefore not necessarily well placed to predict the kinds of innovation that should be pursued, or envisage the future usages of these innovations. This means that some customers engaged in co-innovation are unable to use their resources (and/or the firm’s resources) as the firm expected, simply because they are limited by their frame of reference. In these circumstances, if customers do misuse the available resources, such misuse is clearly accidental, rather than the result of deliberate choice. From the firm’s perspective, if the outcome of such accidental misuse merely leads to an incremental innovation or a “me-too” product while a disruptive innovation was expected, this leaves the field open for competitors who are developing alternative innovations. Accordingly, the intended process of co-creating value thanks to co-innovation has become a value co-destruction process, which has the potential to decrease the firm’s competitive wellbeing – meaning in S-D logic terms that it limits its capacity to adapt to its competitive environment. From the customer’s standpoint, this relative failure to produce effective innovation has “wasted” (that is, misused) personal resources that might have been employed for other more beneficial activities. This, in turn, might provoke frustration and eventually have an adverse effect on the customer’s personal wellbeing – in terms of the latter’s ability to adapt to the environment. Thus, for the customer also, the intended process of value-co-creation has become a co-destruction process.

The second example refers to the misuse of resources that can occur in the context of the role conflict felt by frontline service employees who are subject to competing expectations from their employers and customers. For instance, if the firm has a policy of minimizing the amount of time that employees spend with individual customers, but certain customers insist on employees devoting a lot of time to dealing with their requirements, these customers are (from the firm’s perspective) misusing a resource (in this case, the employee) because they are not using it as the firm expected it to be used. This misuse is likely to be unintentional because the customers are probably not aware of the firm’s policy about the desirable duration of customer-employee interactions.

However, since the firm presumably suffers from the diminished efficiency of its employees, the intended process of value-co-creation has, from the firm’s position, become a co-destruction process. In contrast, from the customers’ view, the prolonged interaction provides them with greater value and improves their wellbeing. In this instance, the accidental misuse of a resource during the systems’ interaction actually co-creates value-in-use for one party (the customers) while simultaneously causing value destruction-through-misuse for the other party (the firm).

Among examples of intentional, as opposed to unintentional misuse, one further explores the case of role conflict. Research across various industries showed that when they contact firms for service, customers essentially expect:

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  to find knowledgeable frontline employees; and

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  to have their problem resolved on the first call.

But the metrics used by these service centers (mostly, time on hold and minutes per call) encourage frontline employees to hurry through calls. In fact, these two factors which customers do care most about are usually absent from customer-service managers’ dashboards. As a result, 50 per cent of the surveyed customers declare that many of the firms they interact with do not understand or care about them. This means that if the employee complies with the firm’s wishes regarding a limitation on the time taken in customer encounters, customers will perceive that this resource (the employee) is not being used in the appropriate manner that they had expected. From the customers’ perspective, the firm is intentionally misusing its own resource, and the effect of this misuse is to diminish the customers’ wellbeing. Hence, from the customers’ stance, this intentional misuse of resources has resulted in value co-destruction. In contrast, from the firm’s perspective, the intentional misuse of resources enables the firm to co-create value, since it is more efficient and productive.

The potential for co-creating value through interactions is huge, but the possibility of interactional value co-destruction should not be overlooked. Managers must recognize that value co-creation is not the only possible outcome of the interaction between service systems. Adverse consequences can occur for a variety of reasons during the process.

Customers and retail staff can “co-create” trouble – especially if there is a combination of a dysfunctional service employee and a cynical customer. Take the case presented by Anthony Patterson and Steve Baron in “Deviant employees and dreadful service encounters: Customer tales of discord and distrust” in which they explore poor service encounters from the customer’s perspective.

They found considerable evidence that customers are markedly cynical about the behavior of retail employees; indeed that customers seem to enter into any service encounter with a degree of barely repressed cynicism and ingrained negativity towards the interaction. The cynicism can be regarded as an additional resource that can be used by customers in the power-play with retail employees. It could be argued that this prevalence of cynicism, discord and distrust is due to the relative youth of the sample in the study. The authors believe, however, that cynicism has so thoroughly permeated popular culture that it is now hardwired into the DNA of the entire population. So does the existence of a cynical populace mean that retailers’ efforts to reach them via their employees are forever doomed to fail? Not necessarily. The fact is that retail employees share something in common with customers – they are cynical too.

Anthony Patterson and Steve Baron maintain that most customers do not visit retail stores with an open mind, waiting to be satisfied or delighted by the service employees. On the contrary, they carry mental baggage: shared, cynical preconceptions of why the employees are behaving the way that they do. Retail organizations often choose to ignore the consumer cynicism. Consequently, there is a tendency to train retail employees to adopt an organizationally devised “script” when dealing with customers. The acronym GAPACT is typical. Employees are advised to Greet (say “Hello” confidently, making eye contact), Ask (e.g. “How can I help you?”), Provide (Hand the product to customers for inspection), Add-on (suggest accessories), Close the sale (e.g. “Should I pack these for you?”), Thank (Show appreciation for the customer’s time). This type of script has been demonstrated as being a straitjacket for employees because it makes an unreasonable assumption that customers will follow the same script. Where customers are inclined to be cynical in the first place, the employee adoption of such a script reinforces cynicism and can result in customers deliberately aiming to ruin the script.

There may be virtue in GAPACT, but it needs both employees and customers to play along with it. So it is argued that the key training objective of the organization’s HR Department should not be the practice of GAPACT, but how to overcome customer cynicism. Customers have very low expectations, and little confidence in the well-recognized scripts that employees are urged to adopt. Training of retail employees, it is argued, should consist of ways of developing customer trust in their actions (thereby reducing cynicism), together with giving them more scope in their work for constructive creativity.

While retailers would be wise to recognize such scripted GAPACT innovations might be designed to please customers but result in annoying them, such a danger also lies in the prolific practice of loyalty programs. Hundreds of millions of people are members of such programs but not all are happy. Take the problems that many encounter in trying to redeem their frequent-flier program (FFP) accrued miles from airlines. Angry customers do not hold back from venting their frustration on feedback forums. In “Frequent (flier) frustration and the dark side of word-of-web: Exploring online dysfunctional behavior in online feedback forums” Sven Tuzovic investigates online dysfunctional customer behavior caused by frustration incidents among members of loyalty programs in the airline industry and finds that companies have neglected the question whether program participants have negative experiences that lead to frustration.

From a customer perspective, the accumulation of frequent-flier miles resembles an important reason to participate in a FFP. While, technically, accumulated points do not have practical value until they are redeemed, they contain an important psychological meaning. The refusal, reduction or postponement of the promised benefits results in customer frustration which leads to dysfunctional behavior expressed in forms of negative “word of web”. So the consequence for companies would be that these programs do not achieve the retention effect aimed at. On the contrary, one can assume that the overall relationship with the firm is weakened.

Managers should understand the value of monitoring social media such as the blogosphere, online communities and forums as well as consumer rating sites. More and more companies are including social media in their marketing research efforts with the objective of reaching out to consumers and listening to them. Computer manufacturer Dell has 42 employees who spend their workdays on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites and, possibly as a consequence, its ratings in a customer satisfaction index has increased compared with its rivals.

Managements may want to consider compiling the information and creating logs of frustration incidents as well as disloyal customer behavior. Managers should investigate and respond to severe cases of dysfunctional customer behavior. In addition, the information is valuable in the light of a company’s relationship marketing efforts and in particular for managers of the loyalty program. The data compiled may subsequently be used to improve the quality of the loyalty program or even reconsider its complete structure, in case the negative comments outweigh by far the positive feedback.

Customer loyalty programs are popular marketing instruments designed to encourage loyal customer behavior but, despite their popularity, little is known about the relationship between participation in a program and consumer behavior. Considering the huge investments of companies for developing and maintaining such programs it appears relevant to analyze the causes leading to negative emotions as well as the subsequent customer behavior.

Negative emotions are certainly experienced by customers whose dark feelings towards an organization are caused by the organization’s insensitivity, incompetence and overzealousness in preventing theft. The subsequent customer behavior, following the embarrassment and annoyance at being wrongly suspected or accused of being a shoplifter, can be extremely harmful for the store.

Retail crime hurts and retailers need to implement loss-control measures to protect themselves from the criminally-minded customer, but this self-protection – surveillance cameras, shop detectives, electronic article tags and high-tech scanners – can be insensitively applied to honest customers. How many honest customers worry that, despite the fact they have paid for their purchases, the alarms will sound as they walk through the scanners at the exit? The honest people understand that organizations need to combat theft but they also want to be trusted, rather than suspected of being potential thieves.

In “Spirals of distrust vs. spirals of trust in retail customer service: consumers as victims or allies” Lorraine A. Friend et al. suggest a trade-off, maintaining that retailers are in a position to contribute to an upward spiral of trust in retail and in society. To make symbols of trust work, retailers may have to remove outward symbols of distrust. They may need to give up surveillance cameras, store detectives and warning signs, which broadcast distrust of customers’ honesty. Loss-prevention tactics do not necessarily deter shoplifters and can cost as much as the shrinkage. Removing signs of distrust and adding signs of trust may create a “tipping point.” If retailers removed overt displays of distrust, they may be able to create a positive spiral of trust in the marketplace. If retailers add policies to demonstrate respect, cooperation and service, they may ultimately benefit themselves as well as customers and society.

Among the authors’ examples is a shopper who took clothes into a changing room without speaking to a store assistant (because no assistant was there at the time) and then overheard shop staff suggesting she might be a thief. One said “She looks the sort”. Although the shopper was able to confront the employee when she left the changing room, saying “Excuse me. Are you the shop assistant who just suggested I probably pinched this cardigan?” she felt unable to carry on with the purchase. She left the shop, has never been back, and made sure she told all her friends and family about the bad experience. An apology from the shop assistant might have helped diffuse the situation. Service recovery actions can help resolve violations of explicit trust. For instance, an apology for a shopper who, to her distress, discovered that the shop assistant had forgotten to remove the security tag of the item of clothing she had just bought. You do not need to be untrustworthy to get the feeling you are not being trusted, and it all adds to a downward spiral which can make shopping a less enjoyable experience than it should be.

Customers are acutely aware of retailers’ surveillance, technological monitoring and selective (“She looks the type”) targeting. They are aware that customers are assigned to categories of trustworthy and untrustworthy. A retailer’s decision about theft-control methods may create victims or allies of customers. It has been said before, and is worth repeating, that good customer service is often the best way to deter thieves. Maybe it is better to employ an extra shop assistant who spends time talking to customers rather than a store detective to snoop on them. Consequently, retailers who want to build trust might consider increasing, not decreasing, interpersonal interactions. They might consider transferring surveillance expenses to interpersonal services, such as additional staff and training to take a customer’s perspective. Conversational environments may be better for both building trust and controlling shrinkage. Face-to-face communication increases cooperation and trust begins to spiral upwards.

Retail store staff have enormous potential for converting good customers – the ones they need – into bad customers by treating them badly. Wrongly suspecting or accusing them is an example of how someone can be changed from a wholly reasonable person into one set on revenge or retaliation. Some elderly people have even felt it wise (or persuaded by their families) to avoid shopping altogether at places where they are not known and trusted. Forgetfulness, an inability to cope with self-serve systems, and the confusion that can come with age can make calling at a store for a loaf of bread a risky business. How many people have been threatened with prosecution because an organization has not the wit to know, or to try to find out, the difference between a common thief and a respectable shopper with the early stages of dementia? The friends and relatives of people who have suffered that awful experience do not easily forgive the retailer.

While people who deliberately steal from shops know it is wrong and generally accept that they themselves are thieves, many people who deliberately avoid paying their fare on public transport do not seem to think they are doing anything wrong. Catching them in the act and trying to impose a penalty creates that familiar dilemma for organizations of trying to treat customers with respect, but doing their level best to avoid the customer taking advantage. Did they intend to avoid getting a ticket or were they just being absent-minded? Often it is a close call for an inspector who has to confront a fare-dodger on a crowded bus or train.

In “Drawing the line: how inspectors enact deviant behaviors” Jean-Baptiste Suquet considers the problems faced by urban bus inspectors in France where there is a high fare-evasion rate on urban transport systems and where many fare evaders do not consider fraud as rule-breaking. Studying fraudulent behaviors is likely to enhance the reaction of service companies. Fraud is intrinsically related to a given customer’s will to abide by fare rules or not. This means that the characteristics of a fraudulent behavior are not transparent. It is indeed difficult to tell fraud from a mistake. For an organization to decide whether a customer is or is not an evader seems to be problematic: did she/he really want to breach the rule? The intention is to concentrate on control – the actions of frontline employees to make sure customers abide by service rules – the purpose being to show how deviant behavior enactment is processed during control interactions. The distinction between deviant/conform, or functional/dysfunctional behavior is not clear. Making sense of certain behaviors, in this particular case fare evasion, can be problematic for organizations.

Since deviant behaviors are not just a simple issue which managers must be aware of, but a complex phenomenon requiring investigation, they have to keep asking questions about their clients’ behavior. The directions for investigation are numerous: which objectives are appropriate regarding clients’ behavior? Does the company tolerate certain deviant behavior? How does it react to them? Are there some contradictions between service and control objectives? Have the agents encountered some new behavior? Can our deviant customers be turned into regular clients? etc. The answers to these questions must be articulated together in a coherent client management policy.

A second implication is related to these numerous questions the manager has to ask. To answer to them, he should design a process-oriented organization that can favor collective investigation. The purpose of such an organization is not to provide for definitive solutions and inflexible procedures about client behavior. It is to be able to react to a changing environment and to become conscious of the way the company contributes to create this environment. To regulate the continuous interaction between a company and its environment, a manager should pay attention to every kind of actor involved in client behavior management (quality managers, frontline employees, specialized or not, operation managers, marketing experts, etc.). He should consider their different perspectives on the topic and how their respective work contributes to the enactment of the clients’ behavior.

Consistent discussion and collective reflection are essential to improve the organization’s ability to make sense of its environment. Here the manager mainly plays a leading role in the meetings; he has to facilitate vertical contacts (between the management and the “field”) as well as horizontal contacts (between different services, for instance: operation management and marketing, or bus drivers and inspectors).

A third recommendation deals with frontline employees’ management. Their work appears to be critical, and they should therefore be given sufficient attention – especially those involved in control tasks. It is no news for service professionals that frontline work is simultaneously characterized by a high discretional power, empowerment, and role conflicts. This applies to inspectors too. For urban transport especially, where frontline employees are critical for the clients’ perception of service quality, the inspectors undergo a high level of tension between service and sanction (or even control).

As a consequence, a double role for the manager regarding contact-employees is needed. The first one consists of backing up the agents by helping them to better their practices and giving them some clues to solve their dilemma. Action-training, mentoring and team debriefings should be considered as management levers for contact employees. The second role is about listening to the agents and systematically accounting for their perspective and knowledge. They are privileged witnesses in the field, and as such, they can learn much to the management’s benefit about the contradictions of the company policy or the evolutions of the customers’ behaviors they witness.

Some customer behavior has evolved in a way that poses serious challenges for organizations. When companies get press or broadcast publicity for the wrong reasons – “fat-cat” pay packets for top executives, dodgy business practices for instance – this negativity helps to foster a feeling among customers that big business cannot be trusted. As a result, some customers feel this is a reasonable enough excuse to lower their own ethical standards and if they can get the better of the company, so be it. Consequently, businesses can not rely on their customers to “do the right thing”.

In “The international search for ethics norms: which consumer behaviors do consumers consider (un)acceptable?” Larry Neale and Sam Fullerton looked into the “rightness” as opposed to the “wrongness” of buyers and potential buyers across continents, and conclude that, unfortunately, there is indeed a dark side to consumer behavior. Customers find ways to justify their actions to themselves, perhaps because of the all too commonly held perception that some businesses will engage in any action – legal or illegal, ethical or unethical – as a means of achieving its objectives. And it is the objective of profit maximization that immediately comes to mind for the typical consumer. As a consequence, far too many consumers view their own misbehavior as a way to level the playing field. Either the business wins or the consumer wins in this zero-sum game. But while this may also be the prevailing line of thinking for some business organizations and their leaders, it should not be misconstrued to be the most common paradigm.

While it might be easy to simply assert the premise that business cannot trust consumers, it is not that straightforward. There are various ethics-based segments within the population of consumers. Some are prone to condemn any indiscretion; others tend to base their opinion on the situation at hand. Others exhibit a mindset of “let the seller beware” – in essence, anything goes.

While it is important to acknowledge this reality, marketers should also recognize that there are few exogenous variables that can be used to identify members of any one ethics-based segment. While older consumers and women tend to be more ethically inclined, it would be a major mistake to only use demographic variables as the basis for developing any segmentation typology. The problem for the marketer is that these segments are inconsistent with one of the fundamental requirements of effective segmentation; they are not identifiable. So, if businesses cannot trust some of their customers, what can they do?

First, there is a need to acknowledge the fact that consumers often have a great deal of mistrust. First and foremost, businesses must behave as responsible members of a community, and not solely as profit maximizers. Industries, particularly those prone to negative commentaries in the media, need to implement stronger self-regulation. Aggrieved consumers should have a mechanism by which they can articulate their complaints, and while such sounding boards may ameliorate some of the discontent, consumers need to have an easy way to have their legitimate complaints resolved. While this may be done through self-regulation, it also provides a platform for independent regulatory bodies and a variety of governmental agencies. With problem resolution being addressed through actions such as third-party arbitration, consumers should grow less suspicious of a company’s or an industry’s motives.

Businesses also need to understand that those who buy their goods and services are not their only constituencies, and the role of promotion needs to be broadened. Through various promotional initiatives such as public relations and advertising, the audience that comprises politicians, the media, the financial market, and non-purchasers can perhaps be dissuaded from engaging in the dissemination of negative publicity and word-of-mouth communications. And while mass communications can play a meaningful role, it is the tactics germane to relationship marketing that will be crucial.

Relationship marketing stresses long-term relationships that capitalize on lifetime customer value. No longer is the forward-looking company interested solely in the task of customer acquisition. When that consumer purchased her first car at a local dealership, the focus immediately shifted to the task of customer retention. One of the key components of relationship marketing is trust. If the consumer trusts the business, then there is a reduced likelihood that cheating will take place – by either party. Thus, the relationship becomes one best characterized as win-win. Consequently, there is no perceived need to cheat to win. Empathy that leads to each party being able to view the situation from the other’s eyes can also enhance the bond between the buyer and seller to the point that there would be a sense of loss if the relationship was to be prematurely terminated.

As consumers assume a more comprehensive role in the service delivery and transaction processes, there is more potential for abuse. It is easier to keep the excess change when it is an automated teller rather than a human cashier making the mistake. The importance of trust and relationship marketing cannot be overstated.

Although the dark side of customer service is undesirable, needs combating, is costly to organizations which are its victims (and indeed to the honest customers in the long-run) it is worth mentioning that there are beneficiaries. There is employment for in-store security guards for instance. Business opportunities and employment stem from the need for electronic security systems. Also considered a “positive” to be drawn from customers behaving badly is the reminder to other customers of how “not” to behave. In short, the patron who speaks too loudly in the library, the guest who steals towels from the hotel, the insurance-claim swindler, or the passenger who lights up a cigarette in flight, is engaging in an act that reaffirms for everyone else what is socially appropriate and what is not. A pity that rules and penalties, rather than self-control or peer pressure, have to be used to try to discourage such antisocial behavior.

(A précis of the special issue “The dark side of customer service”. Supplied by Marketing Consultants for Emerald.)