Why Your Customer Service Team Continues to Letting You Down Even After Endless Training
Three months ago, I was sitting in one more mind-numbing customer service conference in Perth, enduring to some trainer drone on about the value of “surpassing customer hopes.” Typical talk, same worn-out phrases, same total separation from actual experience.
I suddenly realised: we’re approaching client relations training completely incorrectly.
The majority of training programs commence with the idea that terrible customer service is a skills problem. Simply when we could teach our people the right techniques, all problems would magically get better.
What’s actually happening: with seventeen years working with businesses across the country, I can tell you that techniques isn’t the issue. The problem is that we’re asking staff to provide mental effort without acknowledging the impact it takes on their wellbeing.
Allow me to clarify.
Customer service is fundamentally psychological work. You’re not just fixing issues or managing transactions. You’re taking on other people’s disappointment, managing their worry, and magically preserving your own psychological stability while doing it.
Standard training completely misses this reality.
Instead, it emphasises on surface-level communications: how to greet customers, how to use upbeat terminology, how to adhere to organisational protocols. All valuable elements, but it’s like training someone to swim by only explaining the concepts without ever letting them close to the water.
Let me share a perfect example. Last year, I was working with a large internet company in Adelaide. Their client happiness ratings were awful, and management was baffled. They’d spent hundreds of thousands in thorough training programs. Their staff could recite company policies flawlessly, knew all the correct responses, and scored excellently on role-playing scenarios.
But when they got on the customer interactions with actual customers, the system fell apart.
Why? Because genuine client conversations are unpredictable, charged, and packed of variables that won’t be covered in a guidebook.
Once someone calls raging because their internet’s been broken for three days and they’ve failed to attend important business meetings, they’re not concerned in your positive greeting. They demand authentic recognition of their situation and immediate solutions to solve their issue.
The majority of customer service training instructs employees to stick to procedures even when those procedures are entirely wrong for the context. The result is forced conversations that anger people even more and leave team members feeling powerless.
With this Adelaide organisation, we scrapped the majority of their existing training materials and started again with what I call “Psychological Truth Training.”
Rather than teaching procedures, we taught psychological coping techniques. Before focusing on business procedures, we concentrated on reading client feelings and responding suitably.
Crucially, we showed staff to spot when they were internalising a customer’s frustration and how to emotionally guard themselves without seeming disconnected.
The changes were rapid and significant. Service quality numbers rose by nearly half in two months. But additionally significantly, staff retention got better significantly. People genuinely started liking their work again.
Something else important issue I see constantly: courses that approach every customers as if they’re reasonable people who just need better service.
This is wrong.
After decades in this business, I can tell you that roughly one in six of service calls involve individuals who are basically problematic. They’re not angry because of a real service issue. They’re having a terrible day, they’re coping with individual problems, or in some cases, they’re just nasty individuals who enjoy making others feel bad.
Traditional support training doesn’t equip people for these encounters. Alternatively, it maintains the false idea that with enough empathy and skill, every client can be transformed into a happy customer.
That places huge stress on support people and sets them up for frustration. When they can’t solve an situation with an difficult client, they fault themselves rather than recognising that some encounters are just unresolvable.
A single organisation I worked with in Darwin had started a rule that customer service representatives couldn’t terminate a interaction until the customer was “totally happy.” Sounds sensible in theory, but in actual application, it meant that staff were regularly trapped in hour-long conversations with individuals who had no intention of getting satisfied no matter what of what was offered.
This created a culture of anxiety and helplessness among client relations teams. Turnover was astronomical, and the few employees who continued were exhausted and bitter.
The team changed their approach to incorporate specific protocols for when it was appropriate to politely terminate an futile conversation. It meant teaching people how to spot the warning signals of an difficult client and offering them with language to professionally exit when necessary.
Service quality actually improved because people were allowed to dedicate more valuable time with clients who genuinely required help, rather than being occupied with individuals who were just seeking to vent.
Currently, let’s talk about the obvious issue: output targets and their effect on client relations standards.
Most organisations evaluate client relations performance using measurements like contact quantity, standard call time, and completion rates. These targets completely clash with delivering quality customer service.
If you require support representatives that they must process specific quantities of contacts per hour, you’re fundamentally instructing them to speed through people off the call as fast as feasible.
This causes a essential conflict: you need quality service, but you’re incentivising quickness over completeness.
I consulted with a significant bank in Sydney where support staff were mandated to resolve interactions within an standard of five minutes. 240 seconds! Try explaining a complex account problem and giving a complete solution in less than five minutes.
Not feasible.
The result was that representatives would either speed through interactions without properly grasping the situation, or they’d redirect people to various additional areas to escape long conversations.
Customer satisfaction was terrible, and employee satisfaction was even worse.
I partnered with leadership to restructure their assessment system to emphasise on service quality and first-call completion rather than call duration. True, this meant less calls per hour, but client happiness improved remarkably, and representative anxiety degrees reduced notably.
The lesson here is that you cannot disconnect support quality from the organisational structures and metrics that influence how staff function.
With years in the industry of training in this area, I’m convinced that support isn’t about training people to be interpersonal absorbers who take on endless amounts of customer negativity while staying positive.
Quality support is about building environments, procedures, and cultures that support capable, well-supported, psychologically healthy staff to fix real issues for legitimate clients while maintaining their own mental health and company business’s integrity.
Everything else is just costly window dressing that makes organizations appear like they’re solving client relations challenges without really fixing the real problems.
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