Abstract

Objectives: The study has three objectives; to identify the types of undesirable behaviour, determine categories of undesirable customer behaviour, and reveal the way of dealing employees with undesirable customer behaviour. Methods: The critical incident technique was utilized in analysing interviews with frontline banking employees and managers in Saudi Arabia. Thematic analysis was chosen to analyse the data. Results: It shows that some customers abuse employees verbally, speak loudly, show contempt, post their frustrations on social media, take photos or videos of employees, and try to harm employees by raising false complaints. The types of undesirable customer behaviour can be divided into three categories, namely, behaviours that harm the employees, behaviours that waste employees' time, and behaviours that frustrate both the employees and the other customers. Conclusion: The study concluded that the types of undesirable customer behaviour are different from one sector to another, and it may not occur in another sector besides the banking sector, and the diversity of undesirable customer behaviours creates a barrier to developing a tactic for each behaviour, and the undesirable customer behaviour can be grouped into three categories according to its impact.