The Reason Your Customer Service Team Won’t Stop Disappointing Despite Continuous Training
Not long ago, I was stuck in yet another tedious customer service seminar in Perth, enduring to some trainer drone on about the importance of “surpassing customer hopes.” Typical talk, same worn-out buzzwords, same absolute separation from the real world.
I suddenly realised: we’re approaching support training completely wrong.
The majority of workshops begin with the assumption that terrible customer service is a training issue. Simply when we could show our staff the right approaches, all issues would suddenly improve.
Here’s the thing: following seventeen years working with companies across Australia, I can tell you that skills aren’t the challenge. The problem is that we’re asking employees to provide mental effort without acknowledging the toll it takes on their mental health.
Let me explain.
Client relations is essentially psychological work. You’re not just solving difficulties or managing applications. You’re absorbing other people’s disappointment, managing their stress, and magically keeping your own emotional equilibrium while doing it.
Standard training totally overlooks this reality.
Alternatively, it focuses on basic exchanges: how to greet customers, how to employ positive language, how to follow organisational protocols. All valuable elements, but it’s like teaching someone to swim by just explaining the concepts without ever letting them touch the water.
Let me share a perfect example. Recently, I was working with a large telecommunications company in Adelaide. Their client happiness numbers were awful, and executives was puzzled. They’d spent hundreds of thousands in thorough education courses. Their team could recite organisational guidelines perfectly, knew all the right scripts, and achieved perfectly on simulation scenarios.
But when they got on the calls with real customers, it all collapsed.
The reason? Because real client conversations are complicated, charged, and full of factors that cannot be addressed in a training manual.
When someone calls raging because their internet’s been broken for ages and they’ve missed important professional appointments, they’re not focused in your cheerful introduction. They need genuine recognition of their frustration and immediate action to fix their problem.
Most client relations training shows people to conform to protocols even when those protocols are completely unsuitable for the context. This creates forced interactions that frustrate clients even more and leave employees sensing inadequate.
With this Adelaide company, we scrapped the majority of their previous training materials and began fresh with what I call “Emotional Reality Training.”
Instead of training procedures, we showed emotional regulation methods. Rather than concentrating on company policies, we concentrated on understanding client feelings and responding suitably.
Essentially, we trained staff to spot when they were internalising a customer’s anger and how to psychologically guard themselves without becoming cold.
The outcomes were immediate and dramatic. Client happiness ratings improved by over 40% in 60 days. But even more importantly, team retention got better significantly. People actually started liking their jobs again.
Additionally major challenge I see constantly: courses that approach all customers as if they’re sensible humans who just need enhanced interaction.
That’s naive.
Following extensive time in this field, I can tell you that approximately a significant portion of customer interactions involve individuals who are essentially difficult. They’re not angry because of a valid service issue. They’re going through a terrible time, they’re struggling with individual problems, or in some cases, they’re just nasty individuals who enjoy causing others feel uncomfortable.
Traditional client relations training won’t equip employees for these situations. Alternatively, it perpetuates the myth that with adequate compassion and skill, every person can be converted into a satisfied customer.
This puts enormous burden on customer service people and sets them up for frustration. When they can’t resolve an interaction with an impossible customer, they fault themselves rather than understanding that some encounters are just impossible.
A single business I worked with in Darwin had introduced a rule that customer service people couldn’t conclude a interaction until the customer was “entirely pleased.” Appears logical in theory, but in reality, it meant that staff were regularly stuck in extended conversations with individuals who had no desire of being satisfied no matter what of what was provided.
That created a environment of fear and inadequacy among customer service staff. Staff retention was extremely high, and the few staff who stayed were burned out and resentful.
The team changed their approach to add clear rules for when it was okay to courteously conclude an unproductive interaction. It included teaching people how to recognise the signs of an difficult customer and offering them with language to courteously exit when needed.
Service quality surprisingly got better because staff were able to spend more quality time with customers who really needed help, rather than being occupied with customers who were just looking to argue.
Now, let’s talk about the obvious issue: performance measurements and their impact on customer service standards.
The majority of organisations assess client relations performance using numbers like interaction volume, average interaction length, and closure rates. These metrics totally contradict with providing good customer service.
Once you instruct support people that they must manage a certain number of interactions per shift, you’re fundamentally requiring them to hurry customers off the call as rapidly as feasible.
It causes a fundamental conflict: you expect good service, but you’re incentivising rapid processing over thoroughness.
I worked with a major lending company in Sydney where support representatives were expected to complete contacts within an average of four mins. Four minutes! Try describing a complicated financial situation and providing a complete resolution in four minutes.
Impossible.
The result was that staff would either rush through conversations missing thoroughly comprehending the problem, or they’d redirect people to several other areas to escape lengthy conversations.
Customer satisfaction was abysmal, and representative morale was worse still.
We partnered with leadership to redesign their evaluation measurements to emphasise on client happiness and single interaction resolution rather than speed. Yes, this meant fewer calls per day, but service quality increased remarkably, and staff pressure degrees dropped considerably.
That takeaway here is that you can’t disconnect customer service quality from the business frameworks and targets that govern how staff operate.
Following decades of experience of working in this field, I’m sure that customer service isn’t about educating people to be emotional sponges who take on endless levels of public negativity while staying positive.
Effective service is about building environments, processes, and workplaces that empower competent, adequately prepared, psychologically healthy people to resolve legitimate problems for legitimate customers while preserving their own professional dignity and your company’s integrity.
Everything else is just wasteful window dressing that makes companies appear like they’re solving client relations challenges without really resolving underlying causes.
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