Masked smiles matter – employee verbal expertise and emotion display during COVID-19

Abstract

Throughout the customer journey, the employee-customer interaction drives customer responses. The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically influenced shopping behavior with face masks playing a major role. This research investigates how consumer behavior has changed and how frontline employee (FLE) nonverbal (emotional facial expressions) and verbal cues (verbal expertise) influence customer responses dependent on whether FLEs wear a face mask or not. Semi-structured interviews among consumers, an open association study among students and an experimental study using Panel data were conducted. Findings of these online studies with German-speaking consumers show that face masks do not exclusively cause negative feelings and problems; they also reduce the perceived risk of a COVID-19 infection. Importantly, customers can correctly decode FLE smiling even when wearing face masks; however, the relevance of verbal expertise increases compared to FLE emotion displays. This stateof-the-art research during COVID-19 provides novel insights into dyadic service interactions for research and management.

The effects of companies’ face mask usage on consumers’ reactions in the service marketplace

“…The results uncovered a chain of effects by which seeing a salesperson wearing a face mask heightened consumer perceptions of salespeople credibility, which in turn positively influenced consumer satisfaction with the service. Therefore, in line with other studies (e.g., Hofmann et al , 2021), we conclude that face masks are generally not a barrier to interacting with salespeople; instead, they add trustworthiness and reassure most customers. To further confirm these positive effects and verify whether face masks’ impact on service satisfaction further extends to consumer behavioral intentions (i.e., word-of-mouth intention), we ran a third study to examine the effect of not using face masks in service encounters.…”

“…Investigating the effects of face masks in dyadic service interactions, Hofmann et al (2021) showed that, despite some potential discomforts (i.e., difficulties in communication), face masks lower the perceived infection risk, so individuals generally hold a positive attitude toward the obligation to wear them. Therefore, failing to comply with the new social norm of wearing a mask could also cause a service failure, which may ultimately impact consumer intentions (e.g., spreading positive word of mouth for a service).…”

“…To date, little is known about how consumers interpret mask usage by companies’ staff in the service marketing domain. Using semi-structured interviews and online studies with German-speaking consumers, Hofmann et al (2021) investigated how frontline employees’ (FLEs) facial expressions and verbal expertise influence customer responses depending on whether or not they are wearing a face mask. They found that consumers expressed both positive and negative associations with face masks and that face masks do not prevent customers from correctly decoding employees’ emotions: In fact, consumer responses were higher when FLEs were smiling (regardless of whether they wore a face mask).…”

“…Almost two years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, marketing scholars are still trying to fully understand the effects of the pandemic on consumer behavior (Das et al , 2021; Sheth, 2020). However, to the best of our knowledge, very few studies in the service marketing literature (Hofmann et al , 2021) have explored how consumers’ perceptions are shaped by a company’s staff using face masks. Likewise, very few papers (Grundmann et al , 2020) have tried to investigate consumers’ perceptions of individuals’ credibility based on their face mask usage.…”

Restaurant employees' attitudinal reactions to social distancing difficulties: a multi-wave study

“…The use of facemasks has been shown in prior research as conducive to successful service interactions during the COVID-19 crisis (e.g. Hofmann et al. , 2021).…”