How Come Your Customer Service Team Continues to Letting You Down Regardless of Endless Training
Three months ago, I was sitting in another tedious client relations conference in Perth, listening to some trainer ramble about the value of “going beyond customer expectations.” Same old speech, same tired phrases, same total gap from reality.
The penny dropped: we’re handling client relations training completely backwards.
The majority of courses commence with the assumption that terrible customer service is a knowledge issue. Just if we could train our team the proper methods, all issues would suddenly be fixed.
What’s actually happening: following many years training with organisations across Australia, I can tell you that techniques isn’t the issue. The problem is that we’re demanding people to deliver mental effort without admitting the toll it takes on their mental health.
Here’s what I mean.
Support work is basically psychological work. You’re not just resolving technical problems or processing requests. You’re dealing with other people’s anger, managing their anxiety, and miraculously maintaining your own mental balance while doing it.
Conventional training completely overlooks this reality.
Rather, it focuses on superficial interactions: how to address customers, how to employ encouraging words, how to stick to company procedures. All important stuff, but it’s like teaching someone to cook by only talking about the concepts without ever letting them touch the car.
Let me share a typical example. Last year, I was working with a major telecommunications company in Adelaide. Their service quality scores were abysmal, and executives was puzzled. They’d spent hundreds of thousands in extensive education courses. Their people could repeat business procedures word-for-word, knew all the proper responses, and achieved excellently on simulation scenarios.
But once they got on the calls with real customers, everything collapsed.
Why? Because genuine client conversations are complicated, emotional, and packed of variables that can’t be covered in a guidebook.
When someone calls screaming because their internet’s been down for three days and they’ve missed vital work calls, they’re not interested in your positive greeting. They need genuine acknowledgment of their frustration and rapid solutions to fix their problem.
Most client relations training shows people to conform to procedures even when those procedures are totally unsuitable for the circumstances. It causes fake exchanges that frustrate clients even more and leave employees experiencing helpless.
With this Adelaide business, we eliminated 90% of their current training materials and began over with what I call “Mental Health Training.”
Instead of showing procedures, we trained stress management methods. Instead of concentrating on organisational rules, we focused on reading customer emotions and adapting suitably.
Crucially, we taught employees to recognise when they were internalising a customer’s frustration and how to mentally protect themselves without seeming disconnected.
The changes were instant and remarkable. Service quality ratings improved by nearly half in 60 days. But even more importantly, employee retention improved dramatically. Staff actually commenced liking their jobs again.
Something else major problem I see all the time: courses that treat every customers as if they’re reasonable people who just require better service.
This is naive.
Following years in this industry, I can tell you that roughly a significant portion of client contacts involve people who are essentially unreasonable. They’re not frustrated because of a real service issue. They’re having a terrible day, they’re dealing with private challenges, or in some cases, they’re just unpleasant people who enjoy creating others feel miserable.
Traditional client relations training doesn’t equip employees for these encounters. Alternatively, it maintains the misconception that with sufficient empathy and skill, all client can be turned into a satisfied person.
It places enormous stress on support staff and sets them up for frustration. When they are unable to resolve an situation with an difficult customer, they fault themselves rather than understanding that some interactions are simply unresolvable.
Just one organisation I worked with in Darwin had started a rule that client relations people couldn’t terminate a conversation until the customer was “totally happy.” Sounds reasonable in concept, but in actual application, it meant that employees were frequently held in extended calls with customers who had no intention of becoming satisfied irrespective of what was offered.
It resulted in a environment of fear and inadequacy among client relations staff. Turnover was extremely high, and the small number of people who remained were exhausted and resentful.
We modified their procedure to include specific protocols for when it was acceptable to courteously end an futile conversation. That meant training staff how to spot the signs of an difficult client and providing them with phrases to professionally disengage when appropriate.
Client happiness surprisingly improved because staff were free to dedicate more quality time with customers who actually needed help, rather than being occupied with individuals who were just looking to complain.
Now, let’s discuss the obvious issue: performance targets and their effect on support standards.
Nearly all organisations evaluate support effectiveness using measurements like interaction numbers, standard conversation duration, and resolution statistics. These metrics directly clash with delivering quality customer service.
Once you tell client relations representatives that they have to process set amounts of calls per hour, you’re fundamentally requiring them to hurry clients off the call as fast as possible.
That causes a basic opposition: you need excellent service, but you’re incentivising speed over completeness.
I worked with a large financial institution in Sydney where customer service representatives were required to handle calls within an average of 4 minutes. 240 seconds! Try walking through a complex account problem and providing a adequate solution in less than five minutes.
Impossible.
Consequently was that staff would alternatively rush through conversations lacking properly grasping the situation, or they’d pass customers to multiple different departments to prevent long calls.
Service quality was awful, and employee satisfaction was at rock bottom.
The team collaborated with management to restructure their performance measurements to emphasise on customer satisfaction and initial contact success rather than speed. Certainly, this meant less contacts per shift, but client happiness improved dramatically, and employee stress levels dropped substantially.
This point here is that you cannot divorce customer service standards from the company frameworks and targets that influence how employees operate.
After all these years of training in this area, I’m sure that customer service doesn’t come from about teaching staff to be interpersonal absorbers who take on constant quantities of client mistreatment while being pleasant.
Effective service is about creating environments, processes, and workplaces that support competent, properly equipped, emotionally healthy employees to resolve real issues for legitimate customers while preserving their own mental health and your organization’s values.
Everything else is just costly performance that makes companies feel like they’re solving service quality problems without actually fixing anything.
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