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From Complaints to Assault: The Alarming Rise in Customer Aggression
On July 23, a young woman, upset that a Subway wasn’t open yet, attacked a Subway employee and stole the phone of another. On July 7, a man in Oklahoma, angry that he was being followed through Lowes, grabbed an axe off a shelf and attacked, sending the employee who’d been following him to the hospital. In March, a Las Vegas woman tackled a cake shop worker when she wasn’t happy with the size of the cake topper she’d ordered, injuring the employee and causing her to miss three days of work.
The above customers experienced situations we all might grumble about. No one likes it when they’re in a hurry and a restaurant opens late. Nobody appreciates when a person tails them in a store, because they think you might steal something. If you spend money on a custom order and it’s not right, you’re justified in complaining.
However, these customers are part of a rapidly-growing group of people who are taking their rage too far. According to research, customer violence has been on the rise over the past few years.
What do the numbers say about customer rage?
Customers are increasingly angry. They admit it — 63% of customers feel justifiable rage about the most severe problem they’ve encountered with a product or service. However, an increasing number are hitting back; 43% say they’ve raised their voice to show their displeasure, and 9% are seeking revenge.
While customers may feel justified in their anger, outbreaks of violence are putting workers worldwide in danger:
In the U.K, 69% of surveyed workers say they have experienced verbal abuse, 45% were threatened by customers, and 17% say they were assaulted,according to research from the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW).
Customer-facing workers in Australia and New Zealand report rising aggression: 75% of surveyed workers have been on the receiving end of customer aggression (up from 18% in 2022), and 25% say they face it weekly.
In the U.S., information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows a total of 57,610 nonfatal cases of workplace violence in 2021-2022, the latest time period for which there is data. Those in service professions experienced the most violence, with 25,320 reported cases.
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What can you do to deal with customer aggression?
Customer aggression is obviously a security issue, for both your employees and for your other customers. How can you protect your people from violence?
First, focus on customer service
Poor customer service has been the excuse many of the violent customers have used to justify their attacks on franchise employees; 74% percent of customers report experiencing a product or service problem in the past year. Most of those say the problem cost them money or time, or expressed increasing frustration about trying to get the problem solved.
While missing ranch dressing or poor customer service is no reason to attack another person, it’s best to make sure your staff members are well-trained and don’t give an aggressive customer any reason to attack.
Because customer service might seem like an odd topic for a security blog to address, especially in a post about violence, let’s break this down a little.
Mental health problems are on the rise: Currently, 23% of U.S. adults are suffering from a mental illness, and 5% are suffering with severe mental illness. Not everyone with a mental illness is violent, but many are stressed and not recieving treatment.
“The customer is always right”: When Harry Gordon Selfridge said that customers are always right in 1909, he probably didn’t envision a world where customers attacked employees for an error in a fast food order. However, Selfridge’s saying has informed almost a century of U.S. businesses. Customers believe they’re entitled to what they want, and paired with the growing mental health crisis, this means that mistakes aren’t seen as mistakes, but personal attacks — so affronted customers attack back.
Social media rewards bad behavior: When people get attention for poor behavior, it makes others more likely to engage in similar behavior. Take one woman who climbed in through a drive-thru window for ranch dressing: knowing she was being filmed, she twerked for the camera on the way out.
With all that in mind, professionalism and good customer service is the first line of defense against already-angry customers who feel attacked by mistakes. By ensuring that you have a strong manager on store at each site, you can make sure that your workers are consistently doing their jobs well and providing aggressive customer service — making sure to update a customer who has been impatiently waiting on an order, for example, or checking in with customers to make sure they have everything they need.
Find a good management training course
Good customer service isn’t necessarily going to deter a customer who is already at the boiling point. Consider the woman who attacked the gas station cashier without reading. To help mitigate these problems, franchisees should consider investing in aggressive management training for all employees, not just managers.
A strong management training course will teach employees to read body language and warning signs and deescalate a situation before it gets worse by intervening to soothe someone who has been pacing, sighing or rolling their eyes.
You will probably have to seek out a consultant to provide such a course, however; often corporations don't provide aggressive management training because they don’t want to frighten incoming employees. A good course will focus on scenarios like robberies, active shooters, and violent customers, discussing the specific action employees need to take to keep themselves and the other customers safe.
Have a plan
If a person is truly seeking to do violence, de-escalation isn’t going to work. In this case, it’s important to have a plan in place — employees should know exactly what to do and where to do in case of an emergency, whether that’s retreating to the back with other customers, fighting back, filming the incident, or calling 911 immediately.
Your locations should also have countermeasures, such as cameras, sturdy counters that people can hide behind, and other measures that will keep employees and customers safe. If you aren’t sure how to set up safety countermeasures, it’s time to assess the security of your site by calling a trained assessor.
Protect your people before a complaint turns violent
Customer aggression is a security threat. As violence against frontline workers continues to rise, businesses must go beyond basic training and gut instinct. That means having a clear plan, properly trained staff, and a site designed with real-world threats in mind.
Circadian Risk helps organizations assess their physical security, identify vulnerabilities, and put proactive safety measures in place before incidents occur. With expert-led assessments, score-based analysis, and actionable recommendations, we give you the tools to protect your team from the risks they face every day.
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