The most important retail challenge today? Managing difficult customers

The Retail Technology Show, held at London’s ExCeL during the first week of April, is the U.K.’s largest retail expo and conference, attracting over 15,000 visitors and over 400 exhibitors. I had the pleasure of speaking on stage on behalf of Axonify on what I believe is the most important topic in retail right now: tackling difficult and abusive customers.

In the U.K., customer incivility has become all too common: 73% of frontline staff witness rude or aggressive customers daily or weekly, fueled by rising prices, customer entitlement and understaffing. 

On top of that, it’s costing U.K. retailers £2.2 billion a year in shoplifting and another £1.8 billion in investing in security measures, culminating in a staggering 40% of retail workers who report feeling unsafe at work. 

The threat of abusive and sometimes violent customers in stores has reached an appalling level. According to the British Retail Consortium Annual Crime Survey, retail crime in the U.K. is “spiraling out of control”, with over 2,000 abusive or violent incidents reported every single day. 

The high cost of bad customers

This has multiple impacts, driving high staff turnover, reducing productivity and impacting customer satisfaction—with serious business consequences. When frontline staff lack proper training and support, businesses pay the price. Financial impacts include increased hiring and training costs, lower employee morale and lost revenue. Customers also take notice—when staff seem unsupported or unempowered, trust in the brand erodes, leading to lost loyalty and sales. 

And while the February 2025 U.K. Crime and Policing Bill launched will help by removing the £200 threshold, making every case of shoplifting a crime subject to up to seven years in prison, and also making assaulting a retail worker a standalone offence with up to six months in prison, a new report by Axonify reveals that just 2% of frontline workers have never experienced abusive or difficult customers in the past year.

This means that now more than ever, businesses are obliged to not only support their frontline managers and workers but also provide them with the knowledge and confidence to deal with difficult, potentially abusive or even violent customer interactions. 

Axonify’s 2024 Deskless Report found that dealing with difficult customers was the number one challenge for frontline workers and the number two for managers. This is backed up by the fact that eight out of 10 of the most popular topics from Axonify’s Content Marketplace, a rich content library of over 900 frontline-focused learning topics, were related to challenges with customers or workplace safety.

Proven strategies to mitigate and manage customer incivility

However, support is at hand. From the experience of supporting over four million frontline workers around the world with daily training and enablement, Axonify has developed three proven strategies which all retailers, hospitality businesses and indeed any business with frontline staff, can adopt to mitigate and manage this urgent matter.

Leverage technology

Leverage technology and focus employee learning where it’s needed most. If individual staff members are struggling with topics like dealing with angry customers, they can be supported through tailored, reinforced learning that keeps the topic front of mind should an incident occur.

Create a safe space

Support services and systems are hugely important, especially when it comes to providing scenario-based exercises and real-time guidance and intervention, including leveraging conflict resolution coaches to prepare frontline associates. However, teams need to feel a sense of consistent support so that if they follow protocol or are being disrespected at work, their managers and the company will step in and ensure they’re protected.

Focus on your retail associates’ comfort, confidence and capability

Before taking action, it’s important to reflect on the resources and systems already available. For instance, does your frontline staff have the tools, training and enablement they need to safely diffuse a challenging customer situation? And is that training being reinforced or just front-loaded during onboarding and never revisited?

Supporting frontline staff in this intentional, always-on way is no longer optional; businesses need to foster a consistent sense of comfort, confidence and capability to ensure store associates feel prepared when—not if—a difficult customer walks through the door.