Service and Experience with J. N. Halm: On the customer’s side: When frontline workers take sides—and why that matters

At first, he thought his boss had made a genuine mistake, so he drew his attention. But the boss told him that he was aware that the bill was inflated. However, they had a target to hit, and so it was his job to convince the customer to pay. In his heart of hearts, he felt all wrong. How could he put on a straight face while being so unfair to the customer?

As the business development executive, it was indeed his job to bring business in, but for once, his conscience was not allowing him to rest easy. But who was he to go against an expressed directive from his immediate supervisor? After all, was it not from the same money that he was going to be paid his salary and allowances at the end of the month?

In many organisations in this country, there is an unspoken expectation that frontline employees will do what they are told. When company policy dictates a certain treatment of customers—whether that is a strict return policy, a frustrating fee structure, or an inflexible complaints process—the employee at the counter is expected to enforce it. Smile, hand over the bad news, and move on. It is just business, after all.

But is it just business, really? And does the employee at the counter simply enforce the policy and feel nothing?

The truth of the matter is that frontline employees are human beings, and human beings have a remarkable capacity to feel the pain of others—particularly when they are the ones delivering that pain. For those of us who have spent time thinking about customer service, this is not a trivial matter. It sits at the very heart of what makes service excellence so difficult to achieve and sustain.

A study published in the November 2025 edition of the Journal of Service Research has brought some very important new thinking to this question. The study was titled, “Will Frontline Employees Feel Betrayed When Firms are Unjust to Customers? A Trickle-In Effect via Role Conflict.”

The conventional wisdom in service management has always been that if you treat your employees well, they will treat your customers well. This is what the researchers call the “trickle-out effect”—goodwill flows from the organisation to the employee, and then from the employee to the customer. It is a logical framework, and there is plenty of evidence to support it.

But what the researchers found was that the reverse is also true, and this is where things get particularly interesting. There is also a “trickle-in effect”. When an organisation treats its customers badly, that negative experience travels inward and affects how employees feel about the organisation itself. In other words, the quality of the customer-organisation relationship influences the quality of the employee-organisation relationship.

Why would this be the case? The answer lies in understanding what a frontline employee really is. The researchers use the term “boundary-spanners” to describe them. Frontline employees exist at the intersection between the organisation and its customers. They serve two masters simultaneously—the company that employs them and the customers they are paid to serve. This dual role is what makes their position so uniquely complex.

When a company pursues policies that are unjust to customers—and every Ghanaian who has ever tried to return a product, dispute a bank charge, or navigate a bureaucratic complaints system knows exactly the kind of injustice being described here—the frontline employee is caught in the middle. They are the ones delivering the injustice. They are the face of the policy, even if they had no hand in creating it.

The researchers found that this creates what they call “role conflict”. The employee’s role as a customer advocate clashes directly with their role as an enforcer of company policy. And this role conflict, in turn, leads to feelings of betrayal. The employee begins to feel that the organisation has violated the unspoken contract of their working relationship. It is as if the company has said: “We know you believe in treating customers well. We know you take pride in your service. But you will enforce this unjust policy anyway, because we say so.”

Over time, this erodes something very fundamental: the employee’s trust in and commitment to the organisation.

What is even more fascinating is the moderating role that identification plays in this process. The researchers found that the negative effects were strongest among employees who identified strongly with both the organisation and with customers.

In other words, the employees who care the most—who are the most engaged, the most committed, the most proud of both their company and their service—are the ones hit hardest when the company is unjust to customers.

Pause and think about the implications of that finding. Many organisations in Ghana work hard to build a strong sense of corporate identity among their staff. They invest in training programmes, company values workshops, and internal communications designed to make employees feel proud of the brand. At the same time, many of these same organisations train their frontline staff to put the customer first, to go the extra mile, to make every interaction count. That is all very laudable.

But if the same organisation then pursues policies that treat customers unfairly, it is those very employees—the ones who bought into the company values the most, who genuinely care about the customers the most—who will feel the betrayal most acutely. The investment in building organisational and customer identification has, in effect, made those employees more vulnerable to the damage caused by organisational injustice.

This is a very uncomfortable truth for business leaders to sit with. Yet it is one that cannot be ignored.

In Ghana, the issue of organisational injustice toward customers is not a hypothetical scenario. It plays out in banks where customers are charged fees that were never properly disclosed.

It plays out in insurance companies where claims are delayed, reduced, or denied on technicalities. It plays out in retail environments where refund policies are designed to discourage rather than facilitate returns. It plays out in telecommunications companies where billing disputes become nightmarish journeys through automated systems and indifferent staff.

In all these situations, the frontline employee is the first to bear witness to the customer’s frustration, anger, and sense of being wronged. And according to this research, those employees are not as emotionally detached from the situation as management might assume. They feel it. And what they feel eventually shapes how they think about the organisation that employs them.

The lesson for business leaders is a straightforward one: you cannot treat your customers unjustly without it eventually coming back to haunt your relationship with your own employees. The two are connected in ways that many organisations are only beginning to understand.

For those organisations in Ghana that are serious about service excellence, this research offers a powerful additional argument for treating customers fairly. It is not just about customer retention figures or Net Promoter Scores. It is about the psychological experience of the employee who stands between the organisation and the customer every single day.

That employee’s wellbeing, their sense of integrity, their ability to show up at work with enthusiasm and commitment—all of this is quietly shaped by whether or not they believe the organisation they represent is a fair and just one.

The frontline employee who feels your pain as a customer is telling you something important about the organisation behind them. Business leaders would be wise to listen.

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