The Language Backfire Effect: How Frontline Employees Decrease Customer Satisfaction through Language Use

Extant marketing research holds that customers prefer frontline personnel to speak the customers’ first language. Furthermore, current managerial practices instruct frontline employees to either use the customers’ first language or, in international settings, to use English. Through five studies in different retail and service contexts, we identify situations where the opposite is true. The results of the first two studies suggest that if...