Customer reception: incivility also puts work quality at risk
Incivility in customer-facing roles is often treated as a test of self-control. The management question is more precise: how can organisations protect the quality of request handling after a discourteous exchange, without confusing legitimate complaints with unacceptable behaviour?
What the literature establishes
Christine Porath and Amir Erez (2007, Academy of Management Journal) showed experimentally that exposure to rude behaviour can impair task performance and reduce helping behaviour. Their findings point, in particular, to disruption of available cognitive resources. For customer reception, the issue therefore extends beyond how the exchange is handled: it also concerns the ability to work accurately afterwards.
Why the next exchange does not necessarily reset the balance
Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Catrin Finkenauer and Kathleen Vohs (2001, Review of General Psychology) reviewed research indicating that negative events often carry greater psychological weight than comparable positive events. Their review does not address customer reception specifically, but it provides a framework for understanding why a pleasant interaction does not necessarily offset a hostile one. A succession of generally satisfactory contacts is therefore not sufficient evidence that an incident has had no consequences.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that employees should be shielded from every difficult interaction. That would confuse the difficulty of a request with the way it is expressed: disputing an invoice, emphasising urgency or reporting an error does not in itself constitute incivility. The management task is to define observable behaviours that warrant intervention, rather than label particular customers as “difficult”. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot prescribe
The experiments cited do not directly evaluate Lausanne reception teams dealing with their usual customers. They establish neither a universal recovery period nor a threshold at which a manager should intervene. Training people solely to respond calmly would, however, leave an essential question outside the framework: how can the reliability of subsequent work be checked?
A practical check in Lausanne
As part of SHR’s “Accueil client” programme, a Lausanne site — a medtech company, higher education institution, international sports organisation or scale-up in the Lake Geneva region — could test a protocol combining factual incident reporting, colleague support and the option of handing over. Over a pilot period defined in advance, the team would measure the proportion of cases requiring correction among those handled immediately after a reported incident, then compare it with the proportion for cases of the same type handled outside those sequences. What counts as a correction would be defined before the test, and results would be aggregated without ranking individuals. This indicator would not, by itself, establish a causal effect of the protocol, but it would allow work quality to be monitored beyond the incident count alone. To go further: explore the Client Reception training in Lausanne, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Client Reception in Lausanne
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