Beware of the customer: Managing customer deviance in last mile logistics

Negative customer deviance, such as verbal aggression, excessive demands, illegitimate complaints or non-compliance from recipients (those who receive goods from a delivery person), within last mile logistics (LML), is detrimental to LML providers and their employees. Such behaviours undermine pivotal logistic capabilities, making the supply chain inefficient, waste resources and disrupt logistics service delivery. Current research corroborates the importance of upholding logistics service quality standards to support the growing e-commerce market and meet increasing customer expectations in a competitive market landscape. However, it overlooks the correspondence between this and negatively behaving recipients and their impact on LML employees. Therefore, logistics processes overlook negative customer deviance and fail to mitigate its negative impact. To close these research gaps, this research uses a design science approach and tests the effects of negative customer deviance dimensions on logistics-enabling capabilities and logistics service quality, before investigating a practical solution aimed at mitigating the negative impacts of customer deviances for LML providers and their employees. Therefore, an intelligent digital process twin, in the form of customer deviance early feedback alerts integrated into the LML process, is developed and qualitatively examined. On these grounds, practical implications are derived to help LML providers and their employees with negative customer deviance and to counterbalance its negative effects.