Solutions to Avoid Conflict between Employees and Customers in a Service Provider Company

In general, providing one's expectations and needs on different aspects of life is defined as "satisfaction". Today, all companies try to measure and attract the “satisfaction” of their customers for the provided services to attract more customers, higher lifetime value, and a stronger brand reputation. Accordingly, the conventional advice for employees facing customer complaints is to remain calm and provide high-quality responses to them. However, due to several reasons, this interaction may be pushed to a negative exchange with customer complaints. Because this negative exchange creates several problems for companies, this paper tries to review the literature to investigate the main features of this interaction. Moreover, concerning interaction between employees and customers in a service company, we examine the factors influencing the occurrence of conflicts and the solutions in a real case. Consequently, several solutions to control and manage such conditions are proposed. The guidelines presented in this paper could be practical for managers to avoid conflicts between employees and customers.