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.