Customer mistreatment refers to low-quality interpersonal treatment that employees receive from customers. This conceptualization involves two parties: the perpetrator and the employee. Prior research has predominantly focused on employees, examining how frequent customer mistreatment affects their service outcomes and how these outcomes are contingent on employee characteristics. However, we know little about how employees respond to the perpetrator during these customer mistreatment encounters or how perpetrator characteristics shape what unfolds in the moment of mistreatment. Therefore, the aim of this research is to examine the outcomes perpetrators elicit during discrete customer mistreatment events and how perpetrators’ characteristics, especially perpetrator social status, shape employees’ perpetrator-directed outcomes. Integrating social information processing theory and service role theory, we examine how perpetrator social status influences employees’ perpetrator-directed responses during mistreatment events. We propose that when mistreated by a high-status customer, employees are more likely to take the customer’s perspective and offer help, while they are also more likely to experience job-related stigma and feelings of shame. We tested our theoretical model using an event-based experience sampling (EB-ESM) design, collecting multiple customer mistreatment events over a series of 5 weeks. The final sample included 435 mistreatment events nested within 96 full-time service workers. The results showed that high-status perpetrators of customer mistreatment elicited more perspective-taking and, ironically, more help from employees. This project contributes to the customer mistreatment literature in two ways. First, it advances the emerging event-based perspective by explicitly incorporating the role of the perpetrator, demonstrating how perpetrator characteristics influence employees’ perpetrator-directed responses. Second, it extends beyond the dominant frequency-based approach, which has largely emphasized employee-level contingencies, by highlighting the importance of perpetrator-specific factors in shaping employees’ responses to customer mistreatment events.