Knocking sovereign customers off their pedestals? When contact staff educate, amateurize, and penalize deviant customers

Promoted by marketing discourses, customer sovereignty is characterized by the cult of the customer and the belief that contact staff have to serve the customer. However, research shows that customers adopt improper conduct, such as fraudulent or aggressive behaviors. While largely tolerated, these behaviors prove damaging for contact staff and could eventually lead them to react. How do frontline actors react to such behaviors, which prevent them from developing customer relations in accordance with the mythical discourse? This is the question our article explores. To do so, we use Becker’s interactionism approach to deviance, and investigate how frontline actors in five organizations deal with customer complaints they consider as ‘deviant’. Our results show that when faced with behaviors that they no longer wish to tolerate, contact staff educate, amateurize, or penalize the customer. This research contributes by conceptualizing three alternative forms of relations to customer sovereignty, which contact staff attempt to legitimize through internal and external resources.