Research On The Influence Mechanism Of Frontline Employee Interfering With Customer Misbehavior On Fellow Customer

The service industry has developed rapidly in recent years.As the number of enterprises in the service market continues to increase,service problems caused by customers have also increased,such as hubbub,damage to goods,abuse of employees and other customer misbehaviors are very common.In the service scenario,the existence of other customers is inevitable.In the face of service failures caused by other customer misbehavior,compared with non-intervention,frontline employees intervening in customer misbehaviors have different impacts on the behavior intentions of the fellow customers;The effect of different intervention strategies adopted by frontline employees;The internal mechanism of it;When frontline employees adopt response strategies to the fellow customers,the effects of different intervention strategies are different;The boundary effect of the types of the fellow customers have not been answered.The above issues are worthy of in-depth consideration and analysis by researchers in order to reveal the principles,and provide theoretical guidance for service industry managers to train frontline employees to deal with customer misbehaviors.Based on equity theory and social support theory,this paper adopts scenario simulation experiment method,constructs a mechanism model of the influence of frontline employees’intervention strategies to respond to customer misbehavior on the behavior intention of the fellow customers,and explores the mediating role of the fellow customers’ perception of justice and emotional support between the behavioral intentions of the fellow customers,and further reveal the moderating effect of the fellow customer types and employees on the response strategies of the fellow customers.Three experiments were designed.Experiment 1 explored the direct impact and intermediary mechanism of frontline employees’ intervention strategies on the behavioral intentions of the fellow customers.Experiment 2 explored the moderating effect of frontline employees’ response strategies to the fellow customers at the same time.Experiment 3 tested the moderating effect of the types of fellow customers.The research results show that(1)compared with surface intervention,the deep intervention has a stronger positive influence on the fellow customers to spread positive word-of-mouth intention and revisit intention,which is better than the effect of non-intervention by employees.(2)The fellow customers’ perception of justice and emotional support both play a partial intermediary role in the influence of frontline employee intervention strategies on the behavioral intentions of fellow customers.That is to say,employees can solve jaycustomer problems in a timely and sincere manner,and the fellow customers are more willing to actively spread positive evaluation and revisit again when they feel fairness,respect and warmth.(3)The moderating effect of frontline employees’ response strategies(apology vs.inaction)to the fellow customers at the same time is not significant,which indicates that the fellow customers pay more attention to the way and result of employees dealing with jaycustomer than employees’ remedial performance to the fellow customers.(4)The type of fellow customers(old customers VS.new customers)plays a moderating role in the intervention strategy of frontline employees and the behavior intentions of the fellow customers.That is to say,when employees implement deep intervention,old customers have stronger revisit intention and weaker positive word-of-mouth intention than new customers;When employees implement surface intervention,the positive word-of-mouth intention and revisit intention of old customers are weaker than that of new customers.