The Reason Your Customer Service Team Continues to Letting You Down Despite Continuous Training
Three months ago, I was stuck in another tedious support seminar in Perth, enduring to some trainer drone on about the significance of “going beyond customer requirements.” Same old speech, same worn-out terminology, same absolute disconnect from actual experience.
That’s when it hit me: we’re approaching support training entirely incorrectly.
Most workshops start with the idea that bad customer service is a knowledge issue. Just if we could train our staff the proper techniques, everything would magically improve.
The reality is: with many years working with organisations across Australia, I can tell you that knowledge isn’t the challenge. The problem is that we’re demanding people to provide emotional labour without recognising the toll it takes on their mental health.
Allow me to clarify.
Client relations is fundamentally mental effort. You’re not just fixing technical problems or handling requests. You’re absorbing other people’s frustration, controlling their stress, and somehow maintaining your own mental balance while doing it.
Conventional training entirely overlooks this aspect.
Alternatively, it concentrates on surface-level communications: how to address customers, how to use upbeat terminology, how to follow company procedures. All valuable things, but it’s like training someone to drive by just describing the principles without ever letting them near the car.
Let me share a typical example. Last year, I was working with a significant internet company in Adelaide. Their client happiness numbers were awful, and management was puzzled. They’d invested massive amounts in thorough training programs. Their staff could repeat organisational guidelines flawlessly, knew all the correct responses, and performed excellently on simulation exercises.
But when they got on the customer interactions with real customers, everything broke down.
Why? Because actual customer interactions are messy, emotional, and loaded of factors that cannot be handled in a procedure document.
After someone calls yelling because their internet’s been broken for ages and they’ve missed vital work calls, they’re not focused in your upbeat introduction. They demand genuine acknowledgment of their situation and instant solutions to fix their situation.
The majority of customer service training teaches people to conform to protocols even when those scripts are totally inappropriate for the circumstances. This creates fake conversations that frustrate customers even more and leave employees experiencing powerless.
For this Adelaide company, we eliminated most of their existing training course and started over with what I call “Mental Health Training.”
Instead of training procedures, we showed stress management methods. Before concentrating on company policies, we focused on reading people’s mental states and responding effectively.
Essentially, we showed staff to identify when they were internalising a customer’s negative emotions and how to mentally protect themselves without seeming cold.
The results were rapid and significant. Service quality ratings improved by 42% in two months. But additionally significantly, employee turnover improved significantly. People really commenced appreciating their roles again.
Something else major challenge I see constantly: workshops that approach all customers as if they’re reasonable people who just require enhanced service.
This is unrealistic.
After extensive time in this business, I can tell you that approximately 15% of service calls involve people who are essentially unreasonable. They’re not upset because of a valid problem. They’re having a terrible day, they’re struggling with personal problems, or in some cases, they’re just unpleasant individuals who enjoy causing others experience bad.
Conventional customer service training won’t prepare employees for these encounters. Alternatively, it maintains the false idea that with sufficient empathy and skill, each person can be turned into a pleased customer.
This places huge stress on customer service teams and sets them up for frustration. When they are unable to resolve an interaction with an impossible customer, they blame themselves rather than recognising that some interactions are simply unresolvable.
One company I worked with in Darwin had started a procedure that support people were forbidden to end a call until the client was “totally happy.” Appears reasonable in principle, but in actual application, it meant that employees were frequently held in extended calls with people who had no desire of getting satisfied regardless of what was offered.
This caused a culture of anxiety and powerlessness among support staff. Staff retention was astronomical, and the remaining people who stayed were burned out and resentful.
We changed their procedure to add clear protocols for when it was appropriate to courteously conclude an pointless interaction. This involved training staff how to identify the signs of an impossible customer and offering them with language to politely exit when appropriate.
Customer satisfaction surprisingly increased because employees were allowed to focus more valuable time with customers who actually wanted help, rather than being stuck with customers who were just trying to vent.
At this point, let’s discuss the elephant in the room: performance metrics and their impact on support effectiveness.
Nearly all organisations assess client relations performance using numbers like contact quantity, average interaction time, and completion rates. These metrics directly contradict with providing good customer service.
If you instruct support staff that they need process set amounts of contacts per day, you’re essentially instructing them to speed through clients off the line as rapidly as possible.
That creates a essential opposition: you expect excellent service, but you’re incentivising rapid processing over completeness.
I worked with a significant financial institution in Sydney where support representatives were mandated to resolve contacts within an standard of 4 minutes. 240 seconds! Try explaining a complex financial problem and giving a complete solution in 240 seconds.
Impossible.
Consequently was that staff would alternatively hurry through calls missing adequately comprehending the problem, or they’d pass clients to multiple different teams to prevent long interactions.
Client happiness was awful, and staff satisfaction was at rock bottom.
I partnered with executives to modify their performance system to concentrate on customer satisfaction and initial contact completion rather than call duration. Certainly, this meant reduced interactions per day, but service quality rose dramatically, and staff pressure levels dropped considerably.
This point here is that you cannot divorce customer service quality from the business structures and measurements that govern how employees work.
With years in the industry of working in this space, I’m convinced that customer service doesn’t come from about educating employees to be emotional sponges who endure endless quantities of client mistreatment while staying positive.
Quality support is about establishing systems, processes, and atmospheres that empower capable, well-supported, psychologically resilient people to resolve genuine problems for reasonable customers while preserving their own mental health and company organization’s standards.
Everything else is just wasteful window dressing that makes businesses seem like they’re handling customer service challenges without genuinely resolving the real problems.
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