Corps de l’article

Communities of Practice (CoP), although theoretically formalised since the early ’90s, keep transforming organisational scholarship as they gain importance in the managerial, economic and sociological literature (Cohendet et al., 2010) and practitioner enthusiasm grows for these “unidentified learning structure” (Bootz, 2015). In this article, we intend to contribute to the development of this reflection by extending its scope to the management of deviant customers, a domain for which the notion of CoP has hardly been mobilized, thus constituting a new management object for knowledge management in frontline, where the relatively inferior position of employees is accentuated by service organisations’ focus on customers and the consequent overlooking of employees (Yagil, 2017).

While the question of customer misconduct has gained increasing prominence among the daily concerns of service professionals (Fisk et al., 2010; Yagil, 2017), and in several countries around the world (see, for example, the empirical basis of Akkawanitcha et al., 2015 and Stroebaek and Korczynski, 2018), the myth of customer sovereignty tends to prevent companies to challenge customers’ dominance over employees (Korczynski & Evans, 2013) and to provide their staff with guidelines and scripted reaction strategies of how to best react to rude customers (Henkel et al., 2017). By virtue of their position as the interface with customers, front office staff embody the foremost (and most exposed) point of this frontline. Faced with the difficulty of organizations in designing ad hoc coping procedures and methods, actors on the frontline come to develop their own coping practices. Indeed, they put in place a varied range of tactics and procedures on a daily basis to deal with customer misconduct (Harris & Reynolds, 2006).

However, research has so far accounted for the practices of coping by overlooking the process of their development: how do employees elaborate their own coping practices? Yet this question is critical to understand accurately how contact staff successfully manage to react to customer misconduct, echoing Yue et al.’s call to “advance knowledge beyond simply identifying and describing the types of strategies” (2020, p.2) employees deploy in reaction to customer deviance, as it would lead to explore how staff elaborate their coping practices. We contend that the concept of CoP (Brown & Duguid, 1991; Wenger, 1998) should enable us to better understand how Frontline Employees (FLEs) develop their coping practices by sheding light on the ongoing collective process of coping practice elaboration.

In this article, we argue for using a CoP perspective, by highlighting the critical mechanisms of the development and use of coping practices. We examine these elements empirically through an ethnographic study conducted at the front office of a social security organization. We start by reviewing the literature on coping with customer misbehavior in frontline activities and introduce CoP as a framework for analyzing coping; we then present our methodology and report our results by describing and analysing the dynamics of CoPs in the observed coping situations; finally, we discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of using the CoP framework for understanding coping, and then conclude.

Coping with Deviant Customer Behavior in Frontline Activities

Customer misconduct is now part of the landscape in service literature (Fisk et al., 2010), as it is constitutive of staff daily experience (Grandey et al., 2004). Research has urged for legal reaction (Yagil, 2017), documented managerial efforts to cope with the phenomenon (Harris & Daunt, 2013) and suggested interventions (Gong et al., 2014) or prescriptions (Henkel et al., 2017) to support FLEs. However, organizational reactions towards this issue often prove insufficient, leaving employees to face it on their own. Despite some studies offering rich insights into the practice of dealing with difficult customers, scholarship has overlooked the development of this practice, leaving us with a limited understanding of how workers can acquire the relevant skills to deal with difficult customers for the “concrete accomplishment of work” (Echeverri et al., 2012).

Echeverri et al. (2012) account for employees coping through the practical judgements they make as the interaction unfolds. But they do not trace the judgements back to the production of their “underlying structures of knowledge and skills” (Ibid.). As a result, they stay focused on the coping practices themselves, and the process of developing them remains in the background. We contend a more dynamic approach to knowledge, that is a knowing perspective (Bouty and Gomez, 2010), is needed here. Indeed, notwithstanding their relative ignorance of the actual interactions with customers, some studies stress the development of coping practices. Korczynski (2003) demonstrates how communities form over time through work-based relationships, and can take on a critical role in training. Sayers and Fachira (2015), in their study of a hairstylists’ online forum, stress that the discussion between hairdressers about how to deal with difficult customers is a “never-ending” process, because “the shared script being discussed is never completely agreed upon” – and each controversial discussion stimulates the development and updating of their common knowledge about difficult customers. From this research, we understand it is important to view the development of coping practices as part of an unbroken, ongoing process of learning, stimulated by and visible in the (possibly very short) interactions about misbehaving customers. We should articulate the moment of interaction between customers and employees along with the moments of discussion among staff. In our view, this is consistent with the reciprocal influence between the individual and collective dimensions both at work in actors’ knowing (Bouty and Gomez, 2010).

The coping literature also fails to deal with the collective dimension of the coping practice. Indeed, Echeverri and his colleagues’ use “employees” as a generalization of the individual employee but offer no analysis of the collective elaboration of their underlying structures of knowledge. We do find in the sociological literature some insights into employees’ collective handling of difficult customers. Scholars show that when joining their occupational group, staff adopt the group’s coping practices through employee socialization (Van Maanen, 1991). Such practices, which employees learn on the job, are part of an occupational culture distinct from the culture promoted by management. Accordingly, in their study of the categorization of unethical customers in an insurance company, Cova et al. stress the critical role of the representation of the customer for workers’ identity and recognition (2016). As the latter were jeopardized by new customers ignorant of the appropriate consumption ethos, workers collectively responded through a shared “demonization” discourse. By doing so, they maintained their professional identity by distancing themselves from this new customer. Learning customer representation appears here to be part of workers’ socialization. Stroebaek and Korczinsky (2018) showcase similar evidence of workers’ socialization. They also insist that workers form communities of coping to “socialize the costs of client abuse” (p. 770), and provide emotional support to exposed FLEs, as not every worker was able to deal with it alone. In this respect, these communities resemble the online groups whose members exchange emotional support through empathic communication (Pounds et al., 2018).

All this research, though insightful, offers a narrow picture of contact employees assimilating an occupational culture that enables them to preserve a sense of their professional identity and cope with their job’s emotional difficulties. As FLEs are socialized within their occupational group, they learn how to make sense of the customer, and fashion the latter in ways that prove helpful for bearing their individual suffering. It does not explain yet how contact staff cooperate to concretely perform their work, and when necessary, update the representations, norms and routines that have been instilled to them. Sayers and Fachira’s focus on (possibly controversial) discussions among peers (2015) allows them to reveal the dialogical nature of the process of coping, echoing that knowledge creation emerges through dialogical processes (Baralou and Tsoukas, 2015). Individual professionals exchange and comment upon stories in a forum that constitutes their collective; their arguments stimulate learning, and foster the elaboration of collective scripts and representations about difficult customers, that will eventually influence their individual coping. In a nutshell, the way they approach coping by looking at interactions to reveal the reciprocal influence between the individual and collective dimensions of knowing (Bouty and Gomez, 2010), helps them answer the basic question of how to “handle difficult customers” (Sayers & Fachira, 2015, p. 138, we underline).

To overcome the shortcomings that we have identified, we intend to consider FLEs’ coping with customer misbehavior as a continuous process of practice development, based on the interplay between collective and individual practice. In this sense, the theory of Communnities of Practice (CoP) (Wenger, 1998) seems entirely consistent to analyze this process.

A CoP perspective for FLE coping with customer misconduct

Although the coping literature has drawn inspiration from CoP (Korczynski, 2003), it has left aside the the developmental aspects of its legacy by concentrating its theorizing on the emotional support among coworkers. We strongly support the interest in highlighting the emotional register of CoPs, as these groups are identified by some (Ardichvili, 2008; Clarke, 2006) as a source of the development and sharing of emotional skills. The CoPs are further identified for providing firms with vital learning and innovation as their members improve their practice through the continuous creation of knowledge (Brown & Duguid, 1991; Wenger, 1998; Bootz, 2015; Pyrko et al., 2017). These shared knowledge and practices allow to quickly adjust to problems they meet in “real-life work” and remedy the situation in response to the organization’s inadequate prescription (Brown & Duguid, 1991). For instance, in their study of the UK National Health Service, Pyrko et al. (2017) emphasize that CoP provides practitioners with opportunities to learn how to deal with highly problematic, urgent situations under stress. Guérin (2005) reports a similar role for the CoP formed in a post office located in a sensitive neighborhood which confronted employees with difficult customers in their daily work. Thus, we found it particularly interesting to mobilize the CoP concept to analyze the process of developing coping practices to deal with deviant clients.

CoPs are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis (Wenger et al., 2002, p.4). According to Wenger (1998), the emergence of a CoP constitutes a response to historical, social, cultural, and institutional conditions (of work) in the organization where it originates. CoP members learn through their social participation in real practice while attributing meanings to actions and situations (Wenger, 1998). According to the latter, this process of creation and knowledge sharing is called “negotiation of meaning”. It is based on the participation/reification duality. Participation implies several actions, such as listening, discussing, observing, making, reacting, etc. Reification corresponds to giving form to an experience by producing artifacts.

Wenger (1998) identifies three dimensions that structure CoPs. The first is Mutual Engagement. It refers to interactions in which individuals engage with one another. “People who work alongside each other in a [group/school/department] without mutual engagement cannot be said to be part of a community of practice” (Herne, 2006, p. 2). The second dimension is that of Joint Enterprise. Presented as a self-organized local entity in a more general context, it results from continued engagement through shared trust, mutual responsibility, and solidarity between its members (Wenger, 1998). Shared Repertoire, as the third dimension, is the outcome of the previous ones. It includes the communal resources (practices, documents, tools, methods, stories, concepts, etc.) that members have developed throughout their common history. Members use these resources during negotiations of meaning and integrate them into practice in order to resolve problems and create new knowledge.

Given their self-organized nature they have long been considered by management as unidentified learning structures (Bootz, 2015). However, some indicators point to their existence in organizations: common ways of committing to doing things together; quick information sharing and spreading of innovation; the development of methods, common representations and styles, shared stories, etc. (Wenger, 1998).

Most of the works that have studied CoPs using a processual approach (Mc Dermott, 2000; Wenger et al., 2002; Harvey et al., 2013) have focused on their evolution characterized by the life cycle model, identifying the stages of the development process of these communities. Other works have sought to study the internal process of knowledge creation within the CoP, following the example of Borzillo & Kaminska-Labbé (2011) who studied the innovation process in five CoPs in the company’s Specialty Chemicals division. Their results distinguish, according to the modes of managerial implication, two steps in the processus called “step-in” and ”step-out”. During the step-in periods, managers were actively involved in guiding CoP activities and “knowledge expansion” processes supporting incremental innovation occurred. During the step-out periods, the CoPs were given full autonomy, the knowledge probing prevailed, resulting in the support of radical innovation. This has created a virtuous cycle of innovation through CoPs. Similarly, we will focus on the process operating within CoPs to account for the process of coping development within CoPs to deal with deviant clients.

Methodology

Ethnography of a Social Assistance Agency

To appreciate how CoPs can help members cope with inappropriate consumer behavior, we need to look at employees’ real work practices. Ethnography is appropriate here, since it allows us to access to the real setting (Langley, 1999) and the reality of practice, however informal these may be, and observe the role occupational communities play in developing this practice (Van Maanen & Barley, 1984). An ethnographic study of frontline work was conducted in a Social Security establishment in France. Even though our focus on this single case does not allow for international comparisons, let us just mention that the French public service offers a context that is less dominated by the idea of consumer sovereignty, compared to what has been described in the western liberal economies such as the US and UK (that constitute most of the empirical basis for the customer misbehavior literature, see Stroebaek and Korczynski, 2018) or even collectivist, high power distance societies like Thailand (Akkawanitcha et al., 2015). As a result, we can expect more balanced power relations between FLEs and their recipients.

It was also relevant for us to focus our study on a social assistance agency, given the characteristics of this organization and its public. Indeed, the establishment in question is in charge of the attribution of social benefits to residents of a particular French county. It distributes 26 kinds of illness and patient care benefits. The management of these benefits is particularly complicated, given the complexity of attribution procedures, in addition to the bureaucratic burden and the multiplicity of the partners involved. Besides its complexity, the work proves delicate because the attribution or not of a particular benefit has a direct impact on the financial resources of the families concerned. Both the complexity and the financial stakes explain that employees must often deal with quite difficult public behaviors (e.g., fraud, incivility, or illiteracy).

In this organization, we analyzed the work at the inbound call center and at one counter. In the call center, the 47 FLEs fielded calls from users seeking information about their rights to benefits and the status of their dossiers. Four managers supervised and check their work, coming to their assistance if necessary. At the counter, 12 FLEs were supervised by three managers and a head manager. The agents experienced stress in their jobs. Work was very intense, given the number of daily calls and in-person enquiries. Staff were also exposed to misbehaving recipients on a daily basis. Yet neither were they passively overpowered by the latter, and they demonstrated strong resilience in the face of the users. Indeed, the stressful and conflictual situations of customer misconduct, together with the incapacity of prescribed institutional modes of operation to deal with them effectively, actually incited those involved to lean on existing work-based relationships to create and share ad hoc coping mechanisms, thus fostering authentic CoPs in the establishments in question.

Data Collection

For each of the two sites studied, we have produced a documentary study enabling us to collect formal data on the work: tasks and goals, FLEs profiles, the prescribed coping procedures, actors susceptible to intervene in conflicts, etc., and conducted semi-directive interviews with various actors to gather discursive data to help us understand their perceptions and behaviors about their work. These interviews allowed us to elucidate certain questions while leaving others unanswered. Indeed, it was difficult for interviewees to verbalize the informal aspects of their practices, and how they dealt with the deviant behaviors they encounter. It was then necessary to observe these phenomena directly (Siggelkow, 2007). We systematically observed the interactions of agents in situ (during a phone call, or while receiving a client at the counter) and ex situ (during coffee or lunch breaks). In this way, we were able to observe the places and moments of interactions, the subjects of the exchanges and their results. We recorded the verbal interactions and we converted the visual traces into written form directly (or as soon as possible thereafter). Tables 1 & 2 present a synthesis of the collected data.

Table 1

Data collected

Data collected

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Table 2

Observation grid

Observation grid

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Data Analysis

A central challenge in a processual study is to “move from a shapeless data spaghetti toward some kind of theoretical understanding that does not betray the richness, dynamism, and complexity of the data but that is understandable and potentially useful to others” (Langley, 1999, p. 694). Following the author’s advice on the different sensemaking strategies to study processes, we mostly used the “Temporal Bracketing Strategy”, getting additional inspiration from the “Grounded Theory Strategy” and the “Narrative Strategy”.

According to Langley, the temporal decomposition strategy fits well with a nonlinear dynamic perspective on organizational processes, allows to handle data including events, interpretations, interactions, feelings, and so (1999, p. 703). Mobilising a grounded theory approach (Gioia et al., 2013) as a complementary strategy to support qualitative rigor and encourage the presentation of research findings in a way that demonstrates the connections between data and concepts, we developed a data structure (See below in Table 3 our data structure).

table 3

Data structure

Data structure

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Three units of analysis emerged from the analysis, allowing to break down the process into three phases: first, the recipient’s deviance and FLE’s difficulty in dealing with the situation in absence of a standard solution provided by the organization; second, customer misconduct stimulates interactions between colleagues as they face the same difficulties; finally, coping practices are developed and help CoP’s members to face to the deviance situation. We present below our results according to these three phases. Finally, drawing on Langley’s “Narrative Strategy” (1991), wich aims to “provide ‘vicarious experience’ of a real setting in all its richness and complexity” (p. 695), we decided to present most of the results in the form of illustrations of observed situations (Siggelkow, 2007).

Results

Most FLEs benefit from CoPs in their daily work

There were CoPs at the sites we studied, the formation of which, and their interactional schemes depend heavily on the spatial organization of the site, as well as on the profiles of the employees.

The call center. The telephone platform takes the form of a large open space containing 47 workstations, allowing employees to interact freely and regularly. About eight colleagues surround each employee. The four supervisors’ offices are located in a corner of the office, some distance away from the customer care operators, and they tend to interact minimally with the operators. This spatial proximity thus enables the formation of a large CoP in the room with numerous interactions, from one workstation to the next, to share or build on customer-related information. Interactions are ongoing and varied (discussions, exchanges, observation of, and listening to telephone conversations, etc.) and extend into the coffee and lunch breaks – sometimes, as two employees told us, even in the carpool on the way home from work.

Furthermore, we identified eight agents who interact either not at all, or very little, with the others, whether while working or on breaks. When we asked a supervisor, he confided: “They are often reproached for not being involved enough in the collective, of wanting to remain alone and distant”. Our observations of and exchanges with these employees reveal that they do not really share a common repertoire with the others, nor do they develop a feeling of belonging to the community. Thus, we consider them non-members of the CoP of this platform.

The counter. The counter is an open space that enables intense and consequential interaction between its 12 agents. Offices enabling personalized reception of certain clients are situated on both sides of the counter. Behind this space is what the group refers to as “backstage”. This includes a large lobby, with the offices of the three supervisors and the head of the department. The latter, unlike their call center counterparts, share the burden of work with the customer care agents by assuming the reception of users for several hours a week, and participate to the discussions at the counter and backstage. They regularly endorse the expertise of certain customer care agents, and their management style is decidedly participatory. In this way, they are part of a CoP comprised of various hierarchical statuses, and in which, according to Restler and Woolis (2007), the lines of authority are more aligned to knowledge than to hierarchy.

In addition, two counsellors seem to not belong to this CoP. Indeed, they remain at a distance from the group, do not engage with the members, and present no traits in common with them. For example, they do not subscribe to the practice of self-regulation that the group put in place to deal with tasks and scheduling. Neither are they aware of a key informal practice of the CoP’s shared repertoire, in particular the way they categorize clients.

Furthermore, it should be noted that the two CoPs identified respectively on the two sites are not interconnected given the silo organization that characterizes this agency, thus not allowing employees to share practices across sites.

In the following lines, we restrict our attention on the identified CoPs of both sites and will not focus any further on the non-member employees of these CoPs. Indeed, their respective managers confided to us that their performance was not satisfactorily, both on the technical and relational aspects of their tasks. The fact that those employees struggled to cope with customers misconduct, which we will now focus on, encouraged us to concentrate on the role of CoPs to foster the development of coping practices. We shall now examine the process by which customer misbehaviors are handled within these CoPs[1], step by step.

Facing customer deviance without organizational support (Step 1)

Let us start with a representative example of what agents experience on a daily basis.

Although she was not personally responsible for the delay in processing the client’s file, Sonia confronted his anger and was even insulted by him. From the very beginning of our immersion in the field, we observed such frequent situations of deviance and that these form an integral part of the daily work of the FLE. The causes of these deviances relate to the structural characteristics of the public, as Alex indicates: “The hardest part of this job is managing the client’s behavior and not the complexity of the legislation that frames the services. (…) We are dealing with a difficult public: underprivileged social classes, with a degraded level of health (disability, invalidity, etc.). Amandine also underlines the recipients are themselves in a difficult situation: “What is difficult in this job is the behavior of the insured. Those who are in a precarious situation. The situation of precariousness, often associated with the lack of knowledge of the language and administrative procedures, favors situations of misunderstanding and stress of the users, which degenerate into aggressive/abusive behaviors on their part, or simply force the agents to justify and explain endlessly their actions and decisions”. The proliferation of these cases leads FLEs to sometimes question the actual work they do on a daily basis, as Adrien reports, with a touch of irony: ‘Honestly, I don’t know if we can call our activity “information” or ‘claims management’. I have the impression that people come more to dispute than to get information’.

As is visible here, misconduct triggers the coping process for lack of organizational support. Indeed, the agents often emphasize the lack of assistance in dealing with these situations and the gaps between the existing procedures and the situations encountered: ‘In this job, you can’t follow instructions to the letter. There are 36,000 different cases; the situation is not always the same (number of clients waiting, aggressiveness, complicated cases, badly formulated requests, etc.). In any case, if the instructions could be strictly respected, we would have been easily replaced by the interactive terminals’ (Interview with Fabien). When they struggle to manage a conflictual conversation, agents seek help from their managers – who often respond they are not available to take over. As one manager said: ‘Sometimes they ask us to take over when they can’t manage unhappy customers, when they are aggressive and don’t want to hang up, etc. (…) It’s not necessarily our job, and we’ll do everything so that the agent can manage alone. It’s a way to make the agent responsible and more competent. But I understand that these are difficult situations to manage’.

The agents also point to other issues that prevent them from dealing well with misconduct if it were not for their colleagues, like Hubert explains: ‘Before, I worked in “Processing”, I was transferred without any training on client relationship management (…) it’s thanks to my colleagues that today I can handle my work. Especially Greg, who’s been on Reception for years… I’ve been able to observe how he handles situations of conflict. What’s more, he gives me advice on staying calm with the clients… Sometimes, he intervenes in situations that I’m not able to handle’. In such cases, agents will engage mutually to share and negotiate the meaning of their experiences to develop the relevant coping practices.

What is striking in this lack of support, is the difference in the categories to refer to customers, between managers (“unhappy customers”) and the agents (Isabelle and Stéphanie talks of “people like her” and “b***”). It highlights an area of the work of the latter, that does not align with organizational prescriptions (starting from the language to describe these situations), and that the agents need to make sense of, to eventually justify and accept the abusive behavior or reject them as illegitimate (think of Amandine who stressed the precarious situation hence the stress of the users). Hubert explains very clearly how the mentoring role of Greg helped him identify these situations, suggesting how the perception and categorization of deviant users is learned from senior members of the CoP.

FLEs repeatedly engage with each other about customer misconduct (Step 2)

As we can see in Sonia’s example, her difficulties (and the actual pain it causes her) in dealing with the client did not leave her colleagues indifferent and they did not hesitate to interact with her to deal with the deviant client. Indeed, at both sites, customer misconduct was a regular motive for interaction between agents. The following examples illustrate the mechanisms of interactions between CoP members seeking to negotiate the meaning of lived situations. These interactions include listening, observing, gesturing and verbal exchanges.

If in many cases (like this one and Sonia’s with the insolant recipient) the interactions occur during and just after a difficult encounter, some informal interactions spread out over time and space, especially in the cafeteria or during breaks, as in the following example.

As in the previous examples the participation of employees to the negotiation of the meaning of this experience enabled them to analyze this delicate situation, make and evaluate suggestions to find a consensus on which practice to apply. This mutual engagement, illustrating the interest of CoP members in these shared issues, is reinforced by the feeling of belonging to a joint enterprise based on trust, solidarity and mutual responsibility between the employees involved. Alain’s warning about the possible consequences of the mistakes made on their image is a very telling example of their willingness to defend their common enterprise. Indeed, there is a clear back and forth between the individual level – Nadine initiates the discussion as she had to cope with the lawyer, as eventually all her colleagues facing similar situations will have to cope with it, and the collective level of the discussion that manifests itself in the interactions between colleagues, based on the common knowledge ground they have (e.g. what is professional secrecy). The constant interplay between these individual and collective levels is precisely what enables them to make sense of the situation.

Furthermore, we can see in all these examples that, beyond the negotiation of the meaning of the clients’ deviations, the combination of agents’ mutual engagement and joint enterprise allows for the elaboration of a coping knowledge and practice, sometimes accompanied by an emotional support of the person who received the deviant client. This constitutes the third phase of the process on which we will focus in the following section.

Employees develop coping practice and enrich their shared repertoire of resources (Step 3)

The last step of the process of coping practice development, is precisely where FLEs can benefit from the resources developed within the CoP. We will see in the following examples that the developed practices can be cognitive or emotional in nature, and can rely on a collective intervention. Furthermore, they are eventually reified and shared in the CoP’s common repertoire of resources, that members can mobilize to cope with the situations they face.

As our data have already shown, coping can be – but is not necessarily individual, as members of the community may step in to provide emotional support and assistance (solution) to the employee facing a difficult client. This enables agents to deal with customer misconduct together. The following example depicts such a situation, where two agents join their effort to fluidly resolve a difficult situation without calling their manager.

The collective dimension of coping in this example consists in the collaboration between Salma and Jean-Marc who handled the difficult client together thanks to a roleplay. Indeed, the practices shared by the CoP members lead them to intervene often in a responsive and coordinated way to crisis situations. The case of Hulk is an effective illustration of these coordinated coping practices.

The spontaneous, yet coordinated reaction of Audrey’s colleagues reveals that – a priori – they have properly understood the meaning of the situation referred to as “pull a Hulk”. Indeed, as the agents told, a similar story occurred several months prior, which had since become a resource of the shared repertoire of this CoP. One day, a client grew irritated and began to tear up his clothes in a rather violent manner like that of the famous sequence of the “Hulk” character. Although extreme, this situation is representative of the frequent collective intervention of colleagues in order to manage a difficult client at the counter. Note here that the collective reaction is distributed between the colleagues taking care of the concrete handling of the recipient, and the colleagues staying to support Audrey emotionally (in other words the coping practice integrates here both emotional and cognitive aspects).

We witnessed another usual form of collective coping at the counter, which operated between new and more experienced members of the CoP through their self-regulation. Usually, thanks to their practice of categorizing clients (cf. supra), the more experienced customer care agents “worked” it so that they dealt with the most complicated “cases”. To avoid raising the suspicions of the clients concerned, they would use the phrase: “I’ll take this one because I know his/her file” (a phrase from their common repertoire). With this practice they leave the less problematic clients to the novices while waiting for their competences to increase.

These examples show the importance of collective (two or more) coping action in dealing with client misbehavior. In addition, they reveal the role of CoP’s common repertoire in the development and sharing of coping practices. Indeed, the practices developed allow to treat the deviance at the origin of the agents’ commitment but also help agents deal with possible future deviancies, and is actually quite typical of CoP coping strategies. The example of Mr. Polatti is a case in point. This client is well-known to the CoP members, whom one agent described as “a person having difficulty understanding things on the phone … discussions with him are difficult and last a long time, and must be re-oriented back to the counter for better processing of his requests” (Interview with Myriam). On a day when he called, the agent who picked up muted the microphone and ironically announced out loud, “Great! I’ve got Mr. Polatti”! The colleagues working around all joyfully responded, “Counter!”.

This experience reveals the interest and richness of the shared repertoire of this CoP. We can see a shared style, with common expressions and ideas, a similar conception of work, and a shared practice. Importantly, this shared repertoire materialized sometimes, contributing to reify the coping practices. At the call center indeed, some practices were shared by means of the “CRM Gems” notebook.

According to a supervisor, the CRM Gems is “a notebook in which customer care operators write down all the crazy stories that happen onsite. You can also find the classic replies of our agents. It’s the older ones who had the idea of making a notebook of them to share their stories and jokes about them. We still do it to this day!” (Interview with a supervisor). CoP members add to it regularly, and new arrivals read it systematically. In that way, it becomes an unofficial tool of socialization and deviancy management training.

Discussion

The development of customer misconduct coping practices through CoPs

Our field study attests to FLEs’ engagement in the development of coping practices within their CoPs. These practices bear the mark of the collective that produced them and can be used to deal with deviance individually or collectively. Our study allows to see coping as an interplay between the individual and the collective (Bouty and Gomez, 2010), and to elucidate the continuous development of practices, providing emotional support (Korczynski, 2003), and enabling the practical accomplishment of work itself (Echeverri et al., 2012).

Rather than directly identifying and classifying coping practices (Harris & Reynolds, 2006), we argue for focusing on their development through the CoPs that have supported the coping process. It allows for a deeper “examination of employees’ response” (Henkel et al., 2017) and a better understanding of FLEs’ experiences (Subramony & Groth, 2021). We believe CoPs provide scholarship with a new theoretical lens to understand how FLEs cope with dysfunctional customers. Figure 1 presents the process of coping practice development within CoPs.

The first step is about FLEs getting aware of customer misconduct and struggling to respond to it. Depending on their working position and environment, they are likely to be exposed to misbehavior. But the point lies in their perception of the inadequacy of organizational resources as to how they should tackle such situations, putting them in a difficult position to concretely perform their tasks. The initial discrepancy will foster interactions with their colleagues and incitate them to enter the CoP to make sense of these difficult situations. Note that this process has some circularity, since an employee could be already part of the CoP when facing a puzzling or challenging situation with a recipient. And as a socialized member of the community (Van Maanen, 1991), the employee could have already learned to label some misbehaviors, as illustrated by Cova et al.’s “demonization” discourse (2016). But our interest for knowing (e.g., our inclination towards a more dynamic perspective on the knowledge creation involved in coping) leads us to put the search for new representations and practices centerstage.

The second step highlights FLEs repeated engagement with each other about customer misconduct. Employees’ “mutual engagement” marks the willingness to find a coping solution. This reflects the sense of belonging to a “joint enterprise” which is strengthened by the mutual commitment of the members and which in turn nourishes FLE’s commitment to the group. Our data show how contact staff use lunch breaks or short breaks between two calls to ask for advice from or offer advice to their colleagues. Even though a few of them preferred to stay isolated, we contend it is essential to understand how work organizations could prevent FLEs from mutual engagement. This echoes Yue et al.’s concern (2020) about the spaces and times when FLEs can be released from customers, and more generally, the means FLEs have to interact.

The third step shows the practices developed, shared and mobilized by the CoP members. Indeed, following from the reciprocal relation between mutual engagement and joint enterprise, employees develop a common repertoire of resources. It contains an ensemble of coping practices as such (e.g. what to respond to an abusive customer), but also cognitive resources (including customer representations) which are used to make sense of the problems encountered. The repertoire offers collective practices such as roleplays, self-regulation, mentoring or emotional support. It results from daily informal discussion within the CoP and can sometimes benefit from a physical support (e.g., the “CRM Gems” notebook, a note on the customer file, Post-it notes…) that allow a better transmission of practices, and their subsequent discussion (and possible evolution). This points at the importance of the organizational elements fostering coping practices reification as reported by Sayers and Fachira (2015) highlighting the role of the online discussion forum for hairdressers.

figure 1

The process of coping practice development within CoP

The process of coping practice development within CoP

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Reframing the management of customer misbehavior

By adopting a processual perspective, our aim was not to analyze the steps of CoPs’ development, as is already the case in the literature (Mc Dermott, 2000; Wenger et al., 2002; Harvey et al., 2013) – which our field was not supporting anyway with the CoPs existing before and still operating after the observations. Our study has rather concentrated on the process of practice development within CoPs, and, compared to Borzillo and Kaminska-Labbé’s (2011), who distinguished between the degrees of managerial implication and its effect on innovation, we have stressed the continuity of practice development independently of managerial intervention. Whether at the counter (where managers participate in the CoP) or in the call-center (where they did not), we did not observe different coping practices or different ways to develop them. This advocates for valorizing the knowing dynamics operating within CoPs out of reach of the realms of managerial control, and pleads for reconsidering the relation between staff and management that the literature usually invites us to focus on when it comes to coping at the frontline (Gong et al., 2014).

Indeed, approaching employees coping practices through the lens of CoP bears implication for the management of coping. Service scholars tend to place managers centerstage to cope with customer deviance, observing for instance the latter screen employee candidates to ensure recruiting the right profiles, coach employees and provide them with advice in their facing of rude or difficult customers (Harris & Daunt, 2013). Following Yue et al.’s conclusion that contact staff should be considered as “active agents” in dealing with customer incivility (2020, p.15), however, we suggest that our understanding of customer misbehavior management might over-emphasize the role of managers, by giving them the main role when it comes to fix the issue (and not just enduring all the stress). Rather, we contend there is a lot to be gained in understanding how employees’ engagement with each other drives coping and allows coping practice development (not limited to a role of emotional support).

This does not mean that managers do not play a role in employees’ coping with customer deviancy, but that it is rather an indirect one, in relation to the management of a collective of employees. Research on CoPs has certainly shown how their management does not lie in supervising or controlling them but rather in acting on the factors making it possible to cultivate such communities (Wenger et al., 2002). In other words, it is about creating a supportive environment to allow for the collective development of such practices and the corresponding knowledge. In this sense, management should not attempt to directly formalize the process of developing coping practices within CoPs, but rather to facilitate the emergence of these essential groups by encouraging mutual engagement among employees, recognizing their joint enterprise and providing the resources and infrastructure they need to develop.

Conclusion

Our contribution has shown the interest of the CoP concept for understanding coping with customer misconduct. The ethnographic study of these communities and their practice development mechanisms reveal the processual nature of coping and inscribes the employees’ practices in a specific learning period and in an individual-collective interplay. Approaching coping through communities of practice, also enables to consider both emotional support at work and the practical accomplishment of work. Our study finally allows to appreciate the organizational and managerial stakes related to the impetus and maintenance of such informal dynamics. It also opens interesting perspectives in terms of strategy emergence (from the vantage point of customer relationship), with the recent development of the strategy-as-practice scholarship pressing to focus on “inconspicuous local coping actions” to reveal strategy emergence (MacKay et al., 2021). We believe following this path could allow to articulate the process of coping practice development with managerial efforts to capitalize from the experiential knowledge developed within CoPs and extend in a bottom-up approach beyond the realms of these communities.

At the same time, our contribution has limitations. First, the study only concerns one case, and it would be interesting to extend the analysis to other contexts with different organizational characteristics (e.g., with or without existing CoPs). Since our case witnessed no interactions between the two CoPs studied, it would also be interesting to investigate the development of coping practice through exchanges between CoPs, for instance in a context of interorganizational CoP. The second limitation resides in the duration of our immersions, and calls for longer observation supporting further, more precise analysis of the functioning and interactional patterns operating in CoPs. Finally, our analysis deliberately concentrated on the interactions between employees and barely considered managerial practices (since managers were in our case either outside of the communities of practice or members of them). The discussion raised questions in terms of managing contact employees, which it would be interesting to explore. For instance, we could look at the possible role of management in the development of such collective dynamics.