Why Your Customer Service Team Won’t Stop Disappointing Despite Endless Training
Recently, I was stuck in one more tedious client relations conference in Perth, forced to hear to some trainer go on about the significance of “exceeding customer requirements.” Usual presentation, same worn-out phrases, same complete disconnect from actual experience.
The penny dropped: we’re handling customer service training completely incorrectly.
The majority of training programs commence with the idea that poor customer service is a training issue. If only we could teach our team the right methods, everything would suddenly improve.
Here’s the thing: following seventeen years training with businesses across the country, I can tell you that knowledge isn’t the challenge. The problem is that we’re asking people to perform emotional labour without admitting the impact it takes on their wellbeing.
Let me explain.
Client relations is essentially psychological work. You’re not just solving issues or handling requests. You’re dealing with other people’s anger, handling their anxiety, and somehow keeping your own emotional equilibrium while doing it.
Conventional training entirely ignores this aspect.
Rather, it concentrates on surface-level exchanges: how to greet customers, how to use encouraging words, how to follow company procedures. All important elements, but it’s like teaching someone to swim by only describing the concepts without ever letting them close to the kitchen.
Here’s a classic example. Last year, I was working with a significant telecommunications company in Adelaide. Their service quality numbers were terrible, and leadership was baffled. They’d spent significant money in comprehensive training programs. Their staff could recite company policies flawlessly, knew all the correct phrases, and scored excellently on simulation scenarios.
But when they got on the calls with genuine customers, the system broke down.
Why? Because actual service calls are unpredictable, intense, and loaded of variables that cannot be handled in a training manual.
Once someone calls screaming because their internet’s been down for three days and they’ve lost important work calls, they’re not focused in your positive welcome. They demand genuine validation of their frustration and instant action to resolve their problem.
Nearly all support training instructs employees to adhere to protocols even when those protocols are totally wrong for the situation. This creates forced interactions that annoy customers even more and leave team members experiencing inadequate.
With this Adelaide company, we ditched the majority of their current training materials and started over with what I call “Mental Health Training.”
Rather than teaching responses, we trained emotional regulation techniques. Rather than emphasising on organisational rules, we focused on reading client feelings and adapting effectively.
Most importantly, we showed team members to identify when they were absorbing a customer’s anger and how to emotionally shield themselves without appearing unfeeling.
The changes were rapid and dramatic. Service quality scores increased by over 40% in two months. But more notably, employee turnover increased dramatically. People really commenced liking their jobs again.
Here’s another major problem I see constantly: training programs that approach every customers as if they’re rational individuals who just want improved communication.
That’s wrong.
With years in this industry, I can tell you that about one in six of customer interactions involve customers who are essentially problematic. They’re not angry because of a legitimate service issue. They’re going through a terrible day, they’re coping with personal issues, or in some cases, they’re just unpleasant humans who enjoy making others experience miserable.
Traditional support training doesn’t equip employees for these situations. Rather, it maintains the misconception that with sufficient compassion and ability, each customer can be turned into a happy customer.
It places massive pressure on client relations people and sets them up for disappointment. When they can’t resolve an situation with an unreasonable client, they criticise themselves rather than understanding that some situations are plainly impossible.
One business I worked with in Darwin had started a rule that support staff were not allowed to conclude a call until the customer was “completely satisfied.” Seems sensible in theory, but in reality, it meant that employees were frequently stuck in hour-long conversations with individuals who had no plan of becoming satisfied no matter what of what was given.
It caused a atmosphere of stress and helplessness among client relations people. Staff retention was extremely high, and the small number of employees who stayed were exhausted and bitter.
I changed their procedure to include definite guidelines for when it was appropriate to courteously terminate an futile conversation. That involved training people how to recognise the warning signals of an impossible client and giving them with scripts to politely disengage when necessary.
Customer satisfaction remarkably got better because staff were able to spend more quality time with clients who really wanted help, rather than being tied up with individuals who were just looking to argue.
Currently, let’s discuss the obvious issue: output metrics and their influence on support quality.
Nearly all companies assess customer service performance using metrics like interaction quantity, typical interaction time, and closure statistics. These metrics completely contradict with offering good customer service.
When you instruct support representatives that they need handle set amounts of calls per shift, you’re basically telling them to rush clients off the phone as fast as possible.
That creates a essential conflict: you expect quality service, but you’re incentivising speed over quality.
I consulted with a major bank in Sydney where client relations staff were expected to resolve calls within an average of four minutes. 240 seconds! Try walking through a complicated account problem and providing a satisfactory solution in four minutes.
Can’t be done.
The result was that staff would either hurry through conversations lacking properly grasping the problem, or they’d pass people to various different departments to avoid extended calls.
Client happiness was abysmal, and staff wellbeing was at rock bottom.
We collaborated with executives to modify their evaluation metrics to emphasise on service quality and first-call resolution rather than speed. Yes, this meant fewer interactions per hour, but customer satisfaction rose dramatically, and employee anxiety levels decreased substantially.
This lesson here is that you cannot divorce support effectiveness from the company structures and targets that govern how people work.
With all these years of working in this field, I’m convinced that client relations is not about teaching people to be interpersonal victims who take on unlimited quantities of customer abuse while smiling.
It’s about building systems, processes, and atmospheres that empower capable, well-supported, emotionally healthy staff to fix real issues for reasonable customers while maintaining their own mental health and company organization’s values.
Any training else is just costly window dressing that helps companies appear like they’re handling customer service challenges without actually addressing anything.
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