In November 2019, a customer filed a complaint with the insurance company Ageas. Repairs were carried out on his car after it was damaged in an accident, but he felt that necessary work had been missed. Ageas sent an engineer to check the vehicle but it was decided that no further action was necessary. That’s when the abuse started, says Rachel Undy, operations manager at the company. “It was mostly sexist abuse – very angry – shouting, foul language and quite a lot of personal insults.” In the following months, the customer contacted Ageas 98 times in increasingly threatening and often grotesque ways.
“We finally gave up talking to him, but then his emails continued in the same language,” says Undy. At one point, she recalled, he made snide remarks to her before eventually turning his anger on the male engineer as well – “even threatening to come into the office and confront him face to face”.
Undy has seen an increase in the number of aggressive customers over the past few years, and call center workers are far from alone. You may have noticed the proliferation of “Don’t take it to our staff” signs on the pale walls of surgeries, train stations and family-run restaurants, or have sometimes felt a palpable tension in the public spaces we all inhabit. From shop workers to waiters and surgery receptionists, public-facing staff say they have experienced a spike in abuse with the Covid pandemic. According to the latest figures from the Institute of Customer Service (ICS), the number of shop workers who have encountered abusive customers has risen by 25% since February this year, while the British Medical Association revealed in May that criminal violence in offices of general practitioners has almost doubled in five years.
When times are good and there’s plenty of work and homes for everyone, it’s easy to be nice
In October 2021, a survey conducted for ICS found that half of those who regularly engage with the public had experienced abuse in the past six months – a 6% increase – and 27% had been physically assaulted. The result has been a wave of new policies, including legislation allowing tougher penalties for abusers, introduced in an effort to protect staff who serve the public. Last month, Lincolnshire Council announced a plan to restrict access to some services for “annoying” customers in response to a significant increase in “verbally abusive and aggressive” behavior directed at staff during the pandemic.
Changing behavior for some people means frontline workers have to deal with an extra layer of emotional labor just to get the job done. “It’s really hard to hear someone say they hope my children die,” Bradley, an ambulance call assessor, said recently in support of NHS ambulance staff’s Work Without Fear initiative. In Ageas, Undy described the months of abuse unleashed on her and other staff as “exhausting, frustrating and insulting”. The abuse only ended when the client’s insurance policy was canceled and he was asked to sign a community termination form by police, which he did voluntarily.
“By many, many indicators, violence has been in decline for a very long time,” said Michael Muthukrishna, associate professor of economic psychology at the London School of Economics. “It looks a lot better than it has ever looked in the long run of history.” Yet in recent years, loneliness and mental health issues have eroded confidence and resilience, and here we are, crawling out of a world-shattering pandemic, only to face recession and climate change. We have all experienced the Armageddon atmosphere of empty supermarket shelves during the pandemic, along with shortages of medical supplies and working gas pumps. Too many people have fallen into poverty due to the cost of living crisis. I can go on.
There’s no excuse for abusive behavior, but Muthukrishna says, “Anything that increases stress will increase your anger and frustration and the likelihood that you will lash out. And maybe that’s enough to explain what’s happening specifically during the pandemic.
Illustration: Sam Peet/The Guardian
Behavioral science also points to a broader economic explanation. When times are good and there’s plenty of work and homes for everyone, it’s easy to be nice. Muthukrishna has a neat analogy with the parking lot: “There are things that make you angry; like you might get annoyed when someone sneaks into that space. If there are a lot of places, you’re like, “Oh, what an ass,” then you just find another place. These faults, which always exist in a society, are tolerated when there are enough places to go around. We describe this as a ‘positive-sum environment’ – where other people’s success doesn’t hurt your ability to do well,” he says.
The flip side comes when economic growth slows, creating a dreaded “zero-sum environment”: now, he says, “other people’s success predicts your failure. This creates a completely different dynamic. If you’ve been driving for 30 minutes and you finally see a parking spot and someone is acting like that, you’re going to see some road rage. This could explain why abuse continues to rise even as we try to get back to normal. “People are kind of on edge. A lot of people have had a hard time. But now we’re going through these more systemic changes where the pandemic seems to have triggered some longer-lasting, zero-sum psychological environments where competition goes from being productive to being destructive.”
This dark behavioral trend was already in motion before the pandemic, as reflected in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2019. Co-authored by insurance company Zurich, one of the headline risks for global businesses states: “A decline in human empathy creates global risks in the ‘age of anger’. The report identifies a new global phenomenon of people feeling “disconnected and isolated”, as technology and urbanization erode social bonds. “Deep social instability” ranks sixth in the report’s top 30 risks.
Transport for London ‘Don’t take it out on our staff’ poster at a bus stop. Photo: LDNPix/Alamy
Perhaps also the dehumanizing effects of socializing online, which makes giving bile to strangers as easy as paying many people “seamless” online, has now spread to the streets IRL, along with the extreme, polarizing and reducing effects of social media . “The Internet allows us to form new tribes along the lines of whatever we care about or believe in, and these new tribes are reshaping our societies in ways we’re still coming to terms with,” says Muthukrishna. “Any very small minority can find each other and start defending their common interests. This is true for LGBT groups. It’s true of Arab Spring groups, but it’s also true of QAnon and white supremacy groups or whatever weird, perverted, crazy, obscure thing you happen to be interested in. It may be a good thing in the long run, but it’s fundamentally destabilizing.”
Muthukrishna’s guess is that “we’re in for a tough few years.” But we are not powerless as individuals to moderate the rise of rage. The more prepared we are for change, the smoother the journey will be. “If you create situations where people’s expectations are not met, you trigger zero-sum psychology,” he says. It’s a great human strength that we can adapt to different comfort levels, but it’s change, he says, “that turns people on.” Being prepared for what lies ahead, he suggests, “may go some way to creating some solidarity, making people realize that we’re all in this together now. When that’s not true, because of things like inequality, then you have to address these basics.
“The impact of verbal abuse on people is not insignificant.” Photo: vm/Getty Images
Then there’s the Instagram effect. “This is Fomo [fear of missing out]: why is this guy on vacation in Mauritius and I’m sitting here trying to pay my bills? And 10,000 people or even 10 million people see that person in Mauritius feeling very dissatisfied,” says Muthukrishna. There’s even research, he says, “showing that if your commute goes through neighborhoods that are more affluent than yours, you’re more dissatisfied than if your commute goes through neighborhoods that are like — or worse than — yours.” Knowing this, and that many of the so-called best lives lived online are fake, there is no harm in reducing our exposure to such deeply deflating stimuli.
We also need to get the word out that being mean to people who are trying to do their jobs only makes the service we receive worse. Jo Cawson, chief executive of the Customer Service Institute, points out that understaffing is one of the main causes of poor service and customer frustration at the moment, and if we abuse staff who are already working under increased pressure, they may leave , too. Although assault and spitting is less common than verbal abuse, she says, the effects of the latter, especially on those who work from home, have an impact. “Some of these people have dealt with it themselves. If you take contact center calls all day and some of them start to get quite aggressive, the impact on people is not insignificant. It is being built. We’re seeing an increase in people saying they’re not sure they’ll stay, and certainly an increase in sickness as well.
If people feel socially anxious, this can turn into frustration and anger Gillian Sandstrom, University of Sussex
In early July, Edinburgh Airport had to temporarily close its customer service line as it was inundated with angry customers trying to reclaim their luggage – even though luggage is not handled by the airport but by understaffed airlines . “To allow our teams…
Add Comment