Topic: Occupational Avoidance: Overcoming Customer’s Aggressive Behaviour

Suggested Dates: October

Location: Australia
Prepared by: Tharanie Rajendran
1. What is the Event About?

a. Definition
Customer aggression is defined as unacceptable hostile behaviour exhibited by a current or former
customer of an organisation towards an employee that creates an intimidating, frightening or offensive
situation.

Customer aggression can be influenced by the work characteristics of an organisation, the location of a
workplace, the attributes of the customer, the skills and capability of employees in managing the hazard
and performing their normal work, workplace culture, and the design of the environment.

b. Background

Aggressive and distressed customer behaviour poses a serious risk to the physical and psychological
safety of employees across many customer service domains. The causes of aggressive client/customer
behaviour can be quite broad, but the impact on staff is frequently profound. While there is national
legislation to help prevent aggressive behaviour internally among employees, organisations often have
limited control over the type of behaviour that clients/customers present within the workplace or over
the phone.

Work areas regularly exposed to challenging customer/client behaviour are associated with higher levels
of psychological injury, higher level of absenteeism, and higher level of staff turnover. Largely this is due
to the particular psychosocial demands of these roles, and the more specialised capabilities required to
not only de-escalate, manage and even prevent aggressive behaviour from occurring, but also
maintaining personal resilience when this is a regular factor in the work environment

These sort of violence are not dealt with all business owners, but are more specifically in fast food chain
and retails. In the past 5 years, these violence in the workplace became an increasing problem, and
employers should be aware of what they can do to prevent it, as well as the various legal responsibilities
and restrictions imposed on them.

According to recent researchers and the popular press, people are less able to treat in a courteous and
respectful way at work. In a study conducted on consumer aggression behaviors such as yelling,
rudeness, and threats have been studied under multiple labels, including interactional injustice, under
any influence, workplace bullying, and interpersonal conflict. In general, these behaviors are directly
reflected on the employee’s motivation to work and to deleterious work reactions such as stress and
health problems, retaliatory behaviors, which also impacts the turnover and the profitability of the
organisation. Putting that aside, the reputation of the brand is also at stake when such news gets
reported in the news, making it a critical topic for a training.
An aggressive customer can take many forms, such as:
 Arguing with staff
 Verbal abuse- swearing, name calling, offensive remarks
 Confronting staff about their competency
 Physical abuse: throwing things, anything that may cause an injury
 Vandalising organisation properties
 Active hostile behavior: shouting, shaking fists, any threatening gesture
 clenched fists
 invasion of your personal space
 'eyeballing'

2. Why this event is timely, topical and a must have

Violence and aggression is a massive part of many customer experience workers’ day-to-day job and it
has become less common to get through even one shift without experiencing some sort of abuse. Most
commonly, it’s verbal abuse, although many others do experience physical aggression.

Key facts from a new survey of fast food workers:

 1000 fast food workers responded to our survey in December 2018.
 80% of respondents said they have experienced abuse from a customer at work in the last 12
months.
 41% of respondents are 17 years old or under.
 87% of respondents experienced verbal abuse or aggressive behaviour.
 28% of respondents experienced physical abuse, such as punching, hitting and pushing (or
threats of physical abuse including death threats and threats with a weapon) by a customer.
 32% of respondents said incidents of customer abuse or violence involved behaviour that was
sexual in nature.
 44% of respondents said the abuse they experience has impacted on their mental or physical
health.

Real Stories from Frontline workers

Keep in mind, of the 1,000 workers we surveyed 41% were 17 years old or under and 71% were women.
 “We didn’t have frozen raspberry … so he threatened to slit my throat.”
 “A customer threatened to kill my family and myself if I didn’t remake his cheeseburger because
the first one was apparently too cold.”
 “He threatened to break my kneecaps with a bat.”
 “A customer threatened to kill me and tried to jump through the Drive Thru window.”
 “A customer threw a cigarette butt at me and then drove off.”
 “I’ve been threatened with actual physical knives.”
 “I have been threatened to be raped. I have had customers physically throw items at me
including hot coffee.”
 “I’ve had things thrown at me. Been told they are going to kill me and wait for me after work.”
 “I have been physically and sexually threatened. I have been verbally abused. I have had my life,
health, safety threatened. I have been spat on.”
 “One guy tried to fight one of our 16-year-old workers and then threw his food at the window
and then called the store making bomb threats.”
 “Threats to jump the counter and smash my face in. A customer poured a bottle of coke over my
head. Constant verbal abuse.”

3. Key issues
 Identify and assess outlets where difficult customer behaviour may be considered a risk
management issue
 Support staff in responding to customer behaviour appropriately and in line with
organisational procedures
 Support staff in terms of how they react to such incidents, especially in relation to self-care,
potential time lost and worker’s compensation issues
 Provide the skills and supportive mechanism to managers in order to support their staff

4. Target Market: ALL Industries

 Frontline managers
 Head of Customer service
 Outlet managers
 Franchise heads

Industries: Healthcare, social service, banking, retail, FMCG

5. Research Call Feedbacks

1. Daarwin Subramanee, Medical Doctor, Sydney
This is very common in the healthcare sector. Doctors don’t face it as much as the
nurses and the patient registrars. If this training takes a more practical approach on how
to deal with these aggressive customers, it will be a great help for frontliners in many
industries as this unpleasant action is becoming the norm in Australia. He believes
administrative officers have it the worse in healthcare compared to the others.
2. Joan Loo, Retail Manager, Zara, Perth
She witnesses aggressive customers very often in Sydney and Melbourne and hear
horror stories from other retails in bigger cities. Small issues like no size, no preferred
colour or no exact perfume (due to discontinued product) can trigger this emotion. She
has encountered a verbally abusive customer who calmed down upon offering a
discount for her next purchase (which was accounted as a staff discount) and she
concluded some exhibit these emotions for discounts or freebies.
3. Chien Huey, Nurse, Perth
She mentioned that she sees this almost everyday before she moved from Melbourne to
Perth. More than to nurses, employees at Starbucks and McDonalds encounter this
 more in Melbourne because of wrong order, ice cream machine breaking down and
them running out of certain food. In the healthcare however, many patients and family
members of patients are under a lot of stress and they tend to take it out on nurses or
whoever they see first. Nurses most of the times don’t have the rights to confirm or
discuss a situation with the family member’s of a patient, so when question arises and it
is not answered, the others tend to attack verbal and sometimes physically.
4. Zac Ong, Manager, Lord of the Fries, Melbourne
As a fastfood manager, Zac has experienced it very often in his day in day out work. He
mentioned that the women in fast food has it worse as verbal abuse is very common
and it only gets worse during holidays and festival time as the number of drunk people
walking in at closing hours requesting for large orders is the norm. He tries to
accommodate but he always put the safety of his staffs first.