Beyond Service With A Smile: Individuating Intervention To Facilitate Conversations Between Employees and Customers

Employees have faced increasing incivility and abuse from customers, which has been heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic. We test a method of enhancing the experiences of service employees in a randomized field experiment. To “flip the script” and prompt customer-instigated conversations, we designed and tested an intervention where workers wear badges with “individuating” information about themselves. We found that compared to workers in the control condition, employees in the intervention condition experienced significantly lower customer mistreatment, burnout, job satisfaction, turnover intentions; and higher work meaningfulness.