How Come Your Customer Service Team Won’t Stop Letting You Down Regardless of Continuous Training
Three months ago, I was sitting in one more boring customer service conference in Perth, enduring to some consultant ramble about the importance of “exceeding customer requirements.” Same old presentation, same overused terminology, same absolute disconnect from reality.
That’s when it hit me: we’re addressing client relations training totally wrong.
The majority of workshops start with the idea that terrible customer service is a training gap. If only we could train our people the correct approaches, all problems would automatically be fixed.
Here’s the thing: with nearly two decades consulting with businesses across the country, I can tell you that techniques are not the problem. The problem is that we’re demanding employees to perform mental effort without acknowledging the toll it takes on their emotional state.
Let me explain.
Customer service is basically psychological work. You’re not just solving issues or handling applications. You’re absorbing other people’s frustration, managing their worry, and magically keeping your own mental balance while doing it.
Standard training entirely overlooks this dimension.
Rather, it emphasises on superficial exchanges: how to welcome customers, how to employ encouraging words, how to follow company procedures. All important things, but it’s like training someone to swim by simply talking about the principles without ever letting them close to the kitchen.
This is a perfect example. Last year, I was working with a large internet company in Adelaide. Their customer satisfaction numbers were awful, and management was puzzled. They’d put massive amounts in thorough education courses. Their team could repeat business procedures perfectly, knew all the proper responses, and performed brilliantly on role-playing exercises.
But once they got on the calls with real customers, everything collapsed.
The reason? Because actual service calls are messy, intense, and full of elements that can’t be addressed in a guidebook.
Once someone calls screaming because their internet’s been broken for three days and they’ve missed vital business meetings, they’re not concerned in your upbeat greeting. They want authentic recognition of their situation and instant steps to fix their problem.
The majority of support training shows employees to conform to scripts even when those scripts are entirely wrong for the situation. The result is artificial exchanges that frustrate customers even more and leave staff experiencing powerless.
With this Adelaide business, we ditched most of their previous training program and started again with what I call “Psychological Truth Training.”
Before showing procedures, we taught stress management techniques. Rather than emphasising on organisational rules, we concentrated on reading people’s mental states and responding effectively.
Crucially, we taught team members to recognise when they were absorbing a customer’s anger and how to mentally shield themselves without seeming cold.
The outcomes were immediate and remarkable. Client happiness numbers improved by nearly half in eight weeks. But additionally importantly, employee turnover increased dramatically. People genuinely started appreciating their work again.
Additionally important challenge I see constantly: workshops that handle each customers as if they’re sensible individuals who just require better communication.
That’s naive.
After extensive time in this field, I can tell you that approximately one in six of customer interactions involve individuals who are essentially unreasonable. They’re not frustrated because of a legitimate problem. They’re experiencing a bad time, they’re dealing with individual challenges, or in some cases, they’re just difficult people who like making others endure miserable.
Conventional client relations training fails to ready people for these realities. Instead, it continues the myth that with adequate understanding and ability, every person can be transformed into a satisfied person.
It puts massive burden on client relations people and sets them up for disappointment. When they can’t fix an encounter with an impossible client, they blame themselves rather than understanding that some encounters are just unfixable.
Just one business I worked with in Darwin had started a policy that support staff were forbidden to end a conversation until the customer was “entirely pleased.” Sounds logical in principle, but in actual application, it meant that employees were frequently stuck in hour-long calls with individuals who had no plan of becoming satisfied irrespective of what was given.
This caused a atmosphere of anxiety and inadequacy among support people. Employee satisfaction was terrible, and the few employees who remained were emotionally drained and resentful.
We changed their approach to add clear guidelines for when it was appropriate to professionally end an futile conversation. That involved showing employees how to spot the warning signals of an impossible customer and giving them with phrases to politely withdraw when necessary.
Client happiness remarkably improved because staff were able to focus more quality time with people who really needed help, rather than being stuck with people who were just trying to vent.
At this point, let’s address the major problem: performance measurements and their influence on support effectiveness.
Nearly all companies evaluate client relations effectiveness using measurements like contact numbers, standard call duration, and resolution statistics. These metrics directly contradict with delivering quality customer service.
Once you instruct support people that they have to handle specific quantities of interactions per hour, you’re fundamentally requiring them to speed through clients off the line as rapidly as possible.
It causes a basic contradiction: you expect good service, but you’re encouraging quickness over thoroughness.
I worked with a major bank in Sydney where customer service people were expected to handle contacts within an average of five mins. Less than five minutes! Try describing a complicated account issue and offering a adequate solution in less than five minutes.
Can’t be done.
The result was that staff would alternatively hurry through calls missing thoroughly understanding the problem, or they’d transfer people to various different departments to escape lengthy interactions.
Client happiness was abysmal, and employee wellbeing was at rock bottom.
The team collaborated with management to modify their evaluation metrics to concentrate on customer satisfaction and first-call success rather than speed. True, this meant less calls per shift, but customer satisfaction improved dramatically, and representative anxiety levels dropped notably.
This point here is that you can’t divorce support effectiveness from the business frameworks and metrics that control how people function.
Following years in the industry of training in this field, I’m sure that support is not about educating employees to be psychological absorbers who take on endless levels of customer mistreatment while being pleasant.
It’s about establishing organizations, procedures, and workplaces that enable capable, properly equipped, psychologically resilient employees to solve real challenges for reasonable customers while preserving their own mental health and your company’s standards.
All approaches else is just expensive performance that makes organizations feel like they’re addressing client relations issues without genuinely fixing underlying causes.
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