Nine in ten frontline workers surveyed have experienced customer aggression in the past year.
That’s the headline finding of the ShopCare Customer Aggression Survey, the first national cross-sector study of its kind in New Zealand.
Of more than 2,500 frontline workers surveyed across customer-facing industries, 91% experienced some form of customer aggression over a 12-month period.
Verbal abuse was the most common at 86%, and 10% were exposed to physical violence, including being threatened with weapons.
Selena Armstrong, chief executive of ShopCare, a charitable trust that provides free health and safety guidance to the retail sector and its supply chain, says the scale of abuse is way beyond what was expected.
“Customer aggression has become normalised for far too many people. If your job involves serving customers, it is now almost certain you will face abuse,” Selena says. “Workers carry this harm home to their whānau, and the next day they walk back in and face it all over again.”
“What we know from workers, through the work we do in the retail sector and its supply chain, is that often the abuse is coming from everyday Kiwis, parents, professionals and regular customers who should know better,” Selena says.
The effects extend beyond the incident itself. Stress was the leading impact, reported by 67% of respondents, followed by anxiety at 59%. Selena argues that makes it a national problem rather than one for individual workplaces, especially since these jobs are where many young New Zealanders get their first experience of work.
Woolworths New Zealand, a founding partner of the survey and a major employer of frontline workers, says the findings reinforce what many frontline teams across the country face every day.
“No single organisation can solve this alone, but by working together on a joint response, we can strengthen prevention, improve support for frontline workers, and ensure respectful behaviour is the expectation,” says Denva Wren, the company’s head of safety, health and wellbeing.
Where employers have room to move
For managers, the most useful number might be the one about reporting. While 73% of workers told their employer about incidents, 27% didn’t, and many said they felt reporting wasn’t worth it. A reporting system staff have quietly given up on tells you very little about what’s happening on the floor.
Asked what employers could most usefully do, 64% ranked de-escalation and customer aggression training ahead of every other option. The study also identified opportunities to strengthen workforce consultation and post-incident support.
ShopCare will use the findings to shape guidance, training and advocacy, and wants the study to become an ongoing benchmark so it can measure whether any of it is working.
“By establishing a national benchmark for the first time, this research gives organisations a clearer understanding of the challenge and a stronger basis for action,” says Lance Webb, head of customer experience practice at KPMG New Zealand, which ran the research with ShopCare.
For any business with a counter, a call queue or a service desk, that benchmark is now the number to beat.
SPONSORED
