How Come Your Customer Service Team Continues to Failing Even After Continuous Training
Not long ago, I was stuck in another mind-numbing client relations seminar in Perth, enduring to some expert go on about the importance of “exceeding customer hopes.” Typical presentation, same tired buzzwords, same total disconnect from the real world.
The penny dropped: we’re handling client relations training totally incorrectly.
The majority of workshops start with the belief that bad customer service is a training gap. Simply when we could teach our staff the right approaches, all problems would automatically improve.
The reality is: after many years working with organisations across Australia, I can tell you that techniques aren’t the problem. The problem is that we’re expecting employees to perform psychological work without acknowledging the cost it takes on their emotional state.
Let me explain.
Client relations is essentially emotional labour. You’re not just solving difficulties or handling requests. You’re taking on other people’s disappointment, managing their stress, and magically maintaining your own mental balance while doing it.
Traditional training entirely overlooks this reality.
Alternatively, it emphasises on basic interactions: how to welcome customers, how to apply encouraging words, how to follow organisational protocols. All useful stuff, but it’s like teaching someone to swim by just talking about the principles without ever letting them close to the kitchen.
Let me share a typical example. A while back, I was working with a large phone company in Adelaide. Their customer satisfaction ratings were terrible, and management was confused. They’d invested massive amounts in extensive education courses. Their team could repeat business procedures perfectly, knew all the correct scripts, and scored perfectly on practice exercises.
But when they got on the customer interactions with real customers, the system fell apart.
What was happening? Because genuine customer interactions are complicated, intense, and loaded of elements that cannot be addressed in a training manual.
After someone calls screaming because their internet’s been offline for 72 hours and they’ve failed to attend crucial business meetings, they’re not focused in your positive introduction. They demand real validation of their frustration and instant action to fix their situation.
Most customer service training instructs people to stick to procedures even when those procedures are entirely unsuitable for the circumstances. This creates forced interactions that anger clients even more and leave staff feeling powerless.
At that Adelaide company, we ditched 90% of their previous training course and started fresh with what I call “Mental Health Training.”
Instead of training scripts, we taught stress management methods. Before focusing on company policies, we worked on understanding customer emotions and reacting effectively.
Essentially, we taught staff to recognise when they were internalising a customer’s frustration and how to emotionally guard themselves without appearing cold.
The changes were immediate and significant. Client happiness numbers increased by over 40% in two months. But additionally importantly, staff turnover got better significantly. Staff really began liking their jobs again.
Here’s another important problem I see constantly: workshops that handle each customers as if they’re rational people who just need enhanced service.
It’s naive.
Following extensive time in this field, I can tell you that about one in six of client contacts involve customers who are fundamentally unreasonable. They’re not angry because of a valid problem. They’re going through a terrible day, they’re coping with private problems, or in some cases, they’re just difficult humans who get satisfaction from causing others experience miserable.
Standard customer service training doesn’t prepare people for these encounters. Alternatively, it maintains the myth that with sufficient compassion and technique, each customer can be turned into a pleased customer.
That places huge stress on customer service teams and sets them up for disappointment. When they cannot solve an encounter with an unreasonable person, they fault themselves rather than understanding that some interactions are plainly impossible.
A single business I worked with in Darwin had introduced a policy that customer service staff were forbidden to end a interaction until the person was “entirely pleased.” Appears sensible in theory, but in actual application, it meant that employees were frequently held in lengthy interactions with individuals who had no desire of being satisfied irrespective of what was given.
This caused a atmosphere of stress and inadequacy among customer service people. Staff retention was extremely high, and the few staff who stayed were exhausted and bitter.
I changed their approach to add clear protocols for when it was okay to professionally conclude an unproductive conversation. This included training employees how to spot the indicators of an difficult customer and providing them with language to politely disengage when needed.
Client happiness remarkably got better because staff were free to focus more productive time with people who really required help, rather than being stuck with individuals who were just looking to vent.
Now, let’s talk about the obvious issue: output measurements and their influence on client relations quality.
Most businesses assess support success using measurements like interaction quantity, typical call time, and closure rates. These targets totally clash with offering good customer service.
If you require support staff that they need process set amounts of contacts per hour, you’re fundamentally instructing them to rush people off the call as quickly as possible.
That creates a fundamental opposition: you need quality service, but you’re encouraging rapid processing over completeness.
I consulted with a significant financial institution in Sydney where client relations people were mandated to handle contacts within an average of four mins. Less than five minutes! Try describing a complicated account situation and providing a adequate solution in 240 seconds.
Impossible.
Consequently was that representatives would alternatively rush through interactions missing properly comprehending the situation, or they’d pass clients to various additional departments to avoid extended calls.
Customer satisfaction was abysmal, and employee satisfaction was worse still.
We worked with leadership to restructure their performance system to concentrate on client happiness and first-call success rather than quickness. Certainly, this meant less contacts per shift, but client happiness improved dramatically, and employee pressure amounts decreased considerably.
This lesson here is that you cannot divorce support effectiveness from the company structures and targets that govern how employees operate.
After years in the industry of training in this area, I’m convinced that customer service doesn’t come from about teaching employees to be interpersonal victims who endure constant levels of customer mistreatment while smiling.
It’s about building organizations, procedures, and cultures that enable skilled, properly equipped, emotionally stable people to solve legitimate challenges for appropriate clients while preserving their own mental health and your company’s integrity.
Everything else is just costly theater that helps businesses feel like they’re addressing service quality problems without actually resolving anything.
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