Frontline Service Employee Compliance With Customer Special Requests

As companies struggle to deliver excellent service, many find they need to understand and plan for a diverse array of customer requests. Some requests are unexpected and require employees to go beyond their usual job duties. These requests may be classified as special requests. Knowing how and when to comply with these requests is critical to the firm and the employee, given that failing to comply could negatively affect customer satisfaction, while complying may produce unwanted consequences for the firm. We use grounded theory and content analysis of critical incident special requests from frontline employees to develop a framework and classification scheme that categorizes customer special requests and employee assessments of these requests. Customer special requests were classified into four types of customer deficienciesphysical resources, knowledge, financial, and time. Employee assessments were categorized as positive compliance factors (motivations and ability) or deterrents to compliance, including policy or legal, potential risk, and lack of resources. These findings contribute to theory, as they represent the first effort to categorize customer special requests and employee responses to them. Companies need to be better informed about the types of requests employees receive so that employees can make the most appropriate decisions.