This paper investigates the impact of customer service representative
(CSR) customer-focused emotion management strategies on expressed
customer emotions, beyond the influences of emotional contagion. We
propose that problem-focused strategies (situationmodification and cognitive
change) are likely to reduce the intensity of negative customer
emotions and increase the intensity of positive customer emotions,
whereas emotion-focused strategies (attentional deployment and modulating
the emotional response) will have the opposite impact. Further,we
propose that customer negative emotions will affect the choice of strategies
CSRs employ. Based on evaluator ratings of recorded customer
service calls (N = 228), our findings confirmed the positive effects of
problem-focused strategies and the negative effects of emotion-focused
strategies on customer-expressed emotions. In addition, we found that
initial customer emotions affected the strategy used by the CSR, whereby
negative emotions expressed by the customer reduced the use of the
most effective strategy and increased the use of the least effective
strategy.