Types of customer emotional blackmail perceived by frontline service employees

The purpose of this investigation was to identify the types of customer in the financial service industry who adopt distinctive emotional blackmail styles toward frontline service employees to communicate their needs and desires. In-depth interviews and the Q methodology were employed to collect and analyze data. The Q methodology is especially good at clustering stimuli from subjective judgments to form a description of an indescribable object. Five types of customer with distinctive emotional blackmail styles emerged from this analysis; “Guanxi-using customer”, “demanding customer”, “fair-treatment requesting customer”, “time-pressure-using customer”, and “threat-using customer”. These findings indicate that social changes in services marketing have been occurring and provide researchers and practitioners with a new perspective to deal with new customers in the 21st century.