The Impacts of Frontline Employee Emotional Awareness on Customer Experience: A Multidimensional Perspective

Abstract

In the evolved and recent service economy, customer experience has become a crucial point of differentiation and an essential lever for organizational success. While many factors contribute to the customer journey, the impact of frontline employees on customer experiences is essential. This paper conducts a multidimensional analysis of the impacts of frontline employee emotional awareness on customer experience. Emotional awareness, a prerequisite of emotional intelligence, represents the ability to effectively recognize and understand one’s own emotions and the emotions of others. This framework suggests that emotional awareness is more than a potential attribute or constructive trait, but rather a significant influence on customer perceptions, satisfaction, and loyalty, which occurs directly or indirectly.
By reviewing and synthesizing literature, we examine the key mechanisms influencing emotional awareness, which include authentic emotional expression, emotional contagion, empathetic communication, and service recovery. This analysis finds a relative gap in the literature on this topic by conflating emotional awareness with emotional intelligence broadly or focusing on emotional labor broadly without a fuller exploration of the cognition and affective precursors. In addition, we outline theoretical and practical implications of this work, and suggest that organizations may benefit from a clearer understanding of employee emotional awareness, which could lead to improved, effective approaches to recruitment, training, and organizational culture development. This work contributes to the significant debate in organizations about the potential benefits to organizations from developing emotional awareness of its frontline staff, particularly to provide consistency in quality customer experiences in an increasing competitive environment.