Service and Experience with J. N. Halm: Authentic behaviour

…key to creating good customers

1st April, 2004. My first day on the job. My first day as a banker. As clueless as a newborn, I stumbled into what was to become an environment I would spend the next decade in and out of. As was the practice then for fresh graduates, we were sent to almost every schedule or desk within the branch to learn as much as we could. To say I enjoyed all those roles would be an untruth.

I recall not being particularly fond of cashiering (or tellering). Credit was also not something I was excited about. Passing entries at the back office was also too dreary for my liking. There were times, in those early days, when I even wondered whether this banking thing was something I wanted to do for the rest of my working life. Then I got to the front desk—and that was it! I was home! I loved dealing with customers directly! It really did not feel like work at all. I was just being myself.

For instance, if you met me dealing with an old pensioner who had come to withdraw some money, you would instantly notice the relaxed way I handled that person. It was not because I was so well-skilled in customer service. Far from that.

At the time, I had not even attended any formal training in customer service. I was just seeing that person as I would my grandfather or grandmother. When I slowed down my pace so that the one kept up with me, I was not performing. I was just doing what came naturally to me. And on many occasions, the customer responded to me in a way that no service script could have produced.

Unbeknownst to me, the way I handled customers during my days as a front desk bank employee was a matter that experts had been studying for years. In fact, there is even a term for what I was doing—employee authentic behaviour.

A compelling study published in the December 2025 edition of the Journal of Business Research now gives us the language and the evidence to understand precisely what I was doing back then. The research, titled Connecting With Authenticity: Exploring the Mediating and Moderating Mechanisms between Employee Authenticity and Customer Citizenship Behaviours, examined what happens when frontline employees bring authentic behaviour to their service interactions—and what that authenticity, in turn, does to the customers they serve. The findings are striking, not only for what they reveal about employee authenticity, but for the light they cast on customer behaviour in ways that most businesses have barely begun to think about.

The study defines employee authenticity behaviours across three distinct dimensions. The first is authentic understanding—the genuine effort to comprehend the customer’s situation, needs, and perspective, rather than simply categorising the request and reaching for the standard response. The second is authentic honesty—the willingness to be truthful with the customer, even when the truth is less convenient than a comfortable deflection.

The third is authentic emotional display—the expression of genuine feeling in the interaction, as opposed to the performed emotions that service training programmes so often produce. Together, these three dimensions paint a portrait of the frontline employee who shows up as a whole human being rather than a functional unit in a service delivery system.

The researchers dealt with more than 350 service employee-customer pairs—meaning that both sides of the encounter were surveyed, giving the study an unusual and valuable depth of perspective. What they found was that all three dimensions of employee authenticity behaviour positively influenced the development of social rapport between employee and customer. This is not, perhaps, entirely surprising. We have always known, intuitively, that genuine warmth builds connection. But what the research reveals next is where it becomes genuinely revelatory.

That social rapport, built on the foundation of authentic employee behaviour, does not simply make the customer feel good about their experience. It actively changes how the customer behaves. The study shows that rapport positively affects what researchers call customer citizenship behaviours—a cluster of voluntary, discretionary actions that customers take in support of the service environment and the people within it.

These behaviours include making suggestions to improve the service, offering assistance to other customers or staff, acting with benevolence towards the organisation, and displaying tolerance when things inevitably go less than perfectly. In short, the customer who has experienced authentic service does not just leave satisfied. They become, in a meaningful sense, an ally.

As a matter of fact, the concept of customer citizenship behaviour deserves to be far better known in management circles than it currently is. Most businesses think of the customer as the terminal point of the service encounter—the person to be served, satisfied, and ideally retained. The citizenship behaviour research challenges this framing entirely.

It suggests that customers, under the right conditions, can become active participants in the success of the service environment. They can be the person who alerts staff to a problem before it becomes a crisis. They can be the calm, patient presence that helps a flustered colleague regain their footing during a difficult moment. They can be the source of the honest feedback that no formal survey would ever capture. All of this, the research now tells us, flows from a single upstream source: the authenticity of the employee they encountered.

The study goes further still, examining the conditions under which these effects are strengthened or weakened. One of the most instructive findings concerns what the researchers call customer internal attribution—the tendency of a customer to attribute an employee’s authentic behaviour to genuine personal qualities rather than to training, instruction, or strategic intent. When a customer believes that the warmth and honesty of the employee in front of them is real—is who that person actually is—the rapport that develops is significantly stronger than when the customer suspects they are the recipient of a choreographed performance. Authenticity, in other words, must not only be present. It must be perceived as present. And customers, as it turns out, are remarkably good at telling the difference.

I have realised that this finding has enormous implications for how businesses approach frontline training and management. The instinctive response of many organisations to the challenge of consistent service quality is to script it—to define the correct words, the correct tone, the correct facial expression for every conceivable situation, and to train employees to reproduce them reliably.

The result, all too often, is a frontline that is technically compliant and emotionally hollow. Customers sense this hollowness even when they cannot name it. The rapport does not develop. The citizenship behaviours do not follow. And the business wonders why its satisfaction scores remain stubbornly flat despite all the investment in training.

The research also identifies customer expertise and customer empathy as positive moderators of the relationship between rapport and specific citizenship behaviours. Customers who bring their own knowledge and emotional intelligence to the encounter are better equipped to translate the rapport they feel into meaningful action.

The expert customer who trusts an authentic employee is more likely to offer genuinely useful suggestions. The empathetic customer who connects with an honest frontliner is more likely to extend tolerance when the service environment faces difficulty. Authenticity, it appears, calls forth the best in the customers who encounter it—but particularly in those customers who are themselves capable of recognising and reciprocating it.

One can only imagine the cumulative value that a business generates when its frontline team is consistently authentic, not performing authenticity, but actually embodying it. The customer who makes a useful suggestion that improves the service for everyone who follows. The customer who patiently absorbs a delay without complaint because they trust the people managing it.

The customer who defends the brand to a colleague who has had a bad experience elsewhere, because their own experience has given them genuine reason for loyalty. None of this appears on a balance sheet. None of it is captured in a Net Promoter Score. And yet all of it is real, and all of it has value, and all of it begins with a single employee choosing to show up as themselves.

The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel once observed that the authentic self is not a given but an achievement. In the context of frontline service, this is a truth with practical weight. Authenticity is not simply a personality trait that some employees happen to possess, and others do not.

It is something that organisations can cultivate or suppress, depending on the culture they build and the expectations they set. A business that rewards genuine connection and trusts its people to exercise real judgement will, over time, develop a frontline team capable of what I used to do in my days. A business that prioritises compliance over character will produce something that looks like service but feels like nothing in particular.

The customer who is served by someone truly real does not just return. They bring something back with them—a willingness to give, to help, to stand by the place that treated them as a person. That is not a small thing to build. But it begins, always, with the decision to let your people be themselves.

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