Dealing with difficult customers? Taking a few minutes to reflect on your day may help

Front-line service workers spend long hours managing demanding interactions with the public. (Unsplash) Dealing with difficult customers? Taking a few minutes to reflect on your day may help Published: August 3, 2026 7.13am EDT Share article Print article Employees in customer service industries often face hostility in their work environments. When interacting with the public, customers can be rude or demanding. In recent years, the public has grown increasingly toxic and sometimes dangerous. If a customer yells or threatens an employee, that interaction on its own is jarring. But when these incidents accumulate over months and years, the mental health toll grows. Our recent research found there are tactics individual employees can use to improve their own work experience. The study — co-authored with research psychologist William P. Jimenez of the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences — focused on taxi drivers, who are often on the front lines of customer interactions, work long hours and perform a great deal of emotional labour. Customer-facing employees like taxi drivers face frequent hostility on the job, which researchers say takes a measurable toll over time. (Unsplash) Difficult customers take a toll As people become exhausted with their jobs, burnout rates can skyrocket with no relief in sight. Across studies of customer-facing employees, we have found that difficult customer interactions increase burnout, elicit rule-breaking behaviours and influence whether workers want to remain in their occupation. Employees have little recourse to improve their situations. Those working in customer service industries are especially vulnerable because the workforce is disproportionately made up of young people, women, racialized workers and people in precarious socioeconomic positions. Compared with workers who hold greater social and economic power, they may have fewer alternative employment options and less ability to challenge unfair treatment. Because they depend on these jobs, they may feel compelled to tolerate conditions that more privileged workers could afford to leave. Responsibility for fixing this sits clearly with employers, who have tools such as customer conduct policies and managerial support to reduce how often these situations happen. What we studied is whether, in the event a difficult interaction happens anyway, an employee can do something in the moment. We tend to forget the good things In our…