While emotional labor conceptually presupposes the social relationships between service employees and customers, there have been few emotional labor studies which take into consideration customer’s behaviors. Moreover, even when considering customer’s behaviors, most studies have tended to focus on customers’ negative behaviors (or in other words, customer incivility). As the social relationships can be positive or negative, it is necessary to consider customer civility as well as incivility to gain a full understanding of employees’ psychological health affected by their interactions with customers. Beyond the intrapersonal view of emotional labor, this study investigated the direct effects of customer (in)civility on employees’ emotional exhaustion and the mediating effects of emotional labor strategies(surface and deep acting) at the within- and between-individual levels. We tested our hypotheses by using the longitudinal data gathered from the four-wave surveys on 211 sales people over a four-week period. This study found that customer incivility is positively associated with employees’ emotional exhaustion and that surface acting mediates this relationship. On the other hand, customer civility is positively related with employees’ deep acting, but the mediating effect of deep acting on the relationship between customer civility and employees’ emotional exhaustion was not supported. This study has theoretical implication in that it found the effect of customer civility on exhaustion and its association with deep acting, which have been overlooked in emotional labor studies. In addition, our study contributes to the literature by examining the relationships between customer (in)civility, emotional labor and emotional exhaustion at the within- and between-individual levels.