The Real Reason Your Customer Service Training Isn’t Working: A Honest Assessment
Throw out everything you’ve been told about customer service training. Over fifteen years in this business, I can tell you that most of what passes for staff training in this space is absolute garbage.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: your employees already know they should be polite to customers. They realise they should smile, say please and thank you, and handle complaints efficiently. The gap is is how to deal with the emotional labour that comes with dealing with difficult people repeatedly.
A few years ago, I was working with a major phone company here in Sydney. Their customer satisfaction scores were dreadful, and management kept pumping money at standard training programs. You know the type – practice scenarios about welcoming clients, reciting company procedures, and countless seminars about “putting yourself in the customer’s shoes.”
Total rubbish.
The real issue wasn’t that team members didn’t know how to be courteous. The problem was that they were emotionally drained from absorbing everyone else’s frustration without any tools to protect their own mental health. Consider this: when someone calls to vent about their internet being down for the third time this month, they’re not just angry about the technical issue. They’re seething because they feel powerless, and your staff member becomes the target of all that pent-up rage.
Most training programs totally overlook this psychological aspect. Instead, they focus on basic approaches that sound good in concept but crumble the moment someone starts screaming at your people.
The solution is this: teaching your staff emotional regulation methods before you even touch on service delivery skills. I’m talking about relaxation techniques, psychological protection, and most importantly, authorisation to disengage when things get too intense.
With that telecommunications company, we introduced what I call “Emotional Armour” training. Rather than concentrating on protocols, we taught staff how to recognise when they were absorbing a customer’s feelings and how to mentally distance themselves without coming across as cold.
The results were dramatic. Service ratings scores rose by 40% in three months, but more importantly, team stability decreased by nearly half. It appears when your team feel protected to handle difficult situations, they genuinely enjoy helping customers fix their issues.
Additionally that frustrates me: the fixation with forced cheerfulness. You know what I’m talking about – those programs where they tell employees to “constantly maintain a positive attitude” regardless of the context.
Absolute rubbish.
Customers can sense fake cheerfulness from a distance. What they truly want is real attention for their issue. Sometimes that means admitting that yes, their situation genuinely stinks, and you’re going to do your absolute best to assist them resolve it.
I remember working with a large shopping company in Melbourne where leadership had mandated that each customer interactions had to open with “Hello, thank you for picking [Company Name], how can I make your day wonderful?”
Really.
Think about it: you call because your costly product broke down three days after the coverage ran out, and some poor employee has to act like they can make your day “absolutely fantastic.” It’s ridiculous.
We eliminated that script and substituted it with simple authenticity training. Train your staff to actually listen to what the client is saying, validate their concern, and then concentrate on practical solutions.
Customer satisfaction went up immediately.
After decades of experience of consulting in this area, I’m convinced that the largest challenge with customer service training isn’t the training itself – it’s the unattainable demands we put on service teams and the complete shortage of organisational support to address the fundamental problems of poor customer interactions.
Fix those problems first, and your customer service training will really have a possibility to work.
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