Service with Respect ⋆ Institute of Customer Service

Addressing the hostility faced by the UK’s customer-facing staff

With around 60% of the UK’s workforce working in customer-facing roles, mounting abuse is impacting staff across every sector – from retail to public services, and from financial institutions to our public transport networks.

In July 2020, we launched our Service with Respect campaign. The aim was to shine a light on this issue, with research that revealed high levels of abuse and low levels of reporting cross-sector.

On 8 December 2021, The Times published an abridged version of this open letter calling for action to tackle the issue of abuse against public-facing workers.

Following many months of campaigning, we achieved one of the core aims of our Service with Respect campaign: a change in the law to protect customer-facing workers from abuse.

Support the campaign

New legislation

Continued Campaigning

Despite the campaign’s successes to date, customer abuse and hostility is unfortunately still endemic in our society. Our latest round of research released in June 2025 shows a worsening problem; 43% of customer-facing workers experienced an incident of customer hostility in the previous six months, a rise of close to 20% year on year. Abuse of service staff is also impacting the UK economy: 37% of customer service workers are considering leaving their jobs due to aggressive customer behaviour. Furthermore, 26% of those experiencing abuse have taken time off work as a result, taking on average eight days’ sick leave.

This is why we are calling on Government to introduce a standalone offence for those working in public-facing roles. 100 CEOs and business leaders have signed an open letter, which you can read here [link], asking for Government to enshrine this vital protection in law, which will act as a deterrent and send a clear signal that abuse of customer-facing staff will not be tolerated.

We will continue to campaign and keep this issue top of mind for businesses, Government, and consumers.

Read open letter

CAMPAIGN TIMELINE

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What your organisation can do

We know from our research that the majority of staff feel well supported by their employer, but as we continue to face tough business conditions ahead, we urge all organisations not to let this fall by the wayside.

We’re asking that organisations across all sectors to:

Support the campaign by displaying the campaign logo on your website and spreading the word on social media
Adopt a zero tolerance approach to hostility and abuse against your employees
Hold regular catch ups with your front-line staff and keep close to what is happening in their day whilst encouraging them to report incidents
Invest in appropriate training and tools for staff to handle the new and increasingly challenging duties they are being tasked with, and to deal with potential conflict as it arises

Show your support

Please help us spread the message on social media by using the hashtag #servicewithrespect and tag us @instituteofcs (X) and @Institute of Customer Service (LinkedIn).