Managing difficult spa customers and situations: implications for employee wellbeing

ABSTRACT

Service failures can provoke guest complaints either in the spa setting or through social media, thus leading to unfavourable reactions (incivility and misbehaviour) and the occurrence of difficult situations. Customer misbehaviour can be triggered by several factors like personality, mood, attention-seeking and financial or ego-driven motivations. Although attention must be paid to service recovery strategies, it is also important to take care of employees, whose wellbeing and performance may be negatively affected by dealing with difficult customers and situations. This relatively under-researched issue will be the focus of the research in this paper using an in-depth case study of a Latvian spa to illustrate challenges and appropriate strategies. This includes the impacts of “emotional labour” on employees’ job satisfaction and wellbeing, the main drivers of typical customer misbehaviour, the coping strategies used by spa employees, as well as key management approaches for supporting staff and dealing with service recovery. The findings reveal that although eliminating customer misbehaviour totally is an unrealistic expectation, clear internal rules, staff training, management support and effective leadership can help to decrease the occurrence of problematic situations, maintain high service quality and enhance employee wellbeing.

KEYWORDS:

• Difficult customers
• employee wellbeing
• service failures
• service recovery
• spas

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Cvetkova

Anna Cvetkova, is a Spa manager and educator, at the department of tourism studies, University of Tartu, Pärnu College, Estonia Email: [email protected].

Melanie Kay Smith

Melanie Kay Smith, is an associate professor and researcher at the department of tourism studies, University of Tartu, Pärnu College, Estonia and Budapest Business University, Hungary Email: [email protected].