Why Your Client Relations Team Keeps Failing Even After Constant Training
Not long ago, I was stuck in another mind-numbing client relations workshop in Perth, listening to some expert ramble about the value of “exceeding customer hopes.” Typical speech, same overused buzzwords, same complete gap from actual experience.
That’s when it hit me: we’re approaching client relations training entirely incorrectly.
The majority of workshops start with the belief that terrible customer service is a training problem. Just if we could show our people the right techniques, everything would automatically improve.
Here’s the thing: after nearly two decades consulting with companies across multiple states, I can tell you that knowledge are not the challenge. The problem is that we’re expecting people to provide mental effort without admitting the toll it takes on their emotional state.
Here’s what I mean.
Client relations is fundamentally psychological work. You’re not just resolving difficulties or managing applications. You’re absorbing other people’s frustration, managing their stress, and miraculously keeping your own emotional equilibrium while doing it.
Standard training entirely misses this reality.
Alternatively, it emphasises on surface-level communications: how to greet customers, how to apply encouraging words, how to stick to organisational protocols. All useful things, but it’s like showing someone to cook by only talking about the theory without ever letting them near the water.
Here’s a typical example. Recently, I was working with a large phone company in Adelaide. Their customer satisfaction ratings were abysmal, and executives was confused. They’d spent significant money in thorough training programs. Their people could repeat organisational guidelines flawlessly, knew all the right phrases, and achieved brilliantly on simulation scenarios.
But when they got on the customer interactions with real customers, it all fell apart.
Why? Because genuine service calls are complicated, intense, and full of variables that won’t be handled in a training manual.
Once someone calls raging because their internet’s been offline for ages and they’ve lost vital professional appointments, they’re not concerned in your upbeat greeting. They demand real recognition of their frustration and instant action to solve their situation.
Nearly all customer service training teaches employees to conform to protocols even when those scripts are totally unsuitable for the context. The result is fake interactions that frustrate clients even more and leave employees sensing helpless.
At that Adelaide organisation, we eliminated the majority of their current training materials and began fresh with what I call “Psychological Truth Training.”
Instead of training scripts, we trained psychological coping techniques. Instead of concentrating on organisational rules, we focused on reading people’s mental states and adapting suitably.
Essentially, we taught team members to identify when they were taking on a customer’s anger and how to psychologically guard themselves without appearing unfeeling.
The changes were rapid and significant. Service quality scores increased by 42% in 60 days. But even more importantly, team turnover got better significantly. Staff genuinely commenced appreciating their jobs again.
Additionally major issue I see constantly: training programs that approach each customers as if they’re reasonable individuals who just want better communication.
That’s wrong.
After extensive time in this business, I can tell you that about 15% of customer interactions involve people who are basically unreasonable. They’re not frustrated because of a legitimate service issue. They’re going through a awful day, they’re coping with private problems, or in some cases, they’re just nasty humans who like making others endure uncomfortable.
Conventional customer service training won’t ready staff for these situations. Rather, it continues the misconception that with adequate understanding and ability, each client can be transformed into a pleased person.
This puts enormous pressure on support staff and sets them up for frustration. When they are unable to fix an interaction with an impossible person, they fault themselves rather than realising that some encounters are just impossible.
Just one business I worked with in Darwin had introduced a rule that customer service representatives were not allowed to end a conversation until the client was “completely satisfied.” Sounds sensible in theory, but in practice, it meant that staff were often held in lengthy calls with customers who had no desire of being satisfied no matter what of what was offered.
That created a culture of fear and powerlessness among client relations staff. Turnover was astronomical, and the small number of staff who stayed were burned out and bitter.
I modified their policy to add clear guidelines for when it was appropriate to courteously terminate an futile interaction. That included teaching staff how to recognise the warning signals of an unreasonable customer and providing them with phrases to professionally disengage when needed.
Customer satisfaction actually increased because staff were free to dedicate more quality time with people who really needed help, rather than being tied up with customers who were just trying to complain.
Now, let’s address the elephant in the room: performance targets and their influence on customer service effectiveness.
The majority of businesses measure support effectiveness using metrics like contact quantity, typical conversation duration, and resolution percentages. These measurements totally clash with offering excellent customer service.
If you instruct client relations people that they must handle a certain number of interactions per shift, you’re essentially telling them to rush clients off the call as rapidly as feasible.
It results in a fundamental opposition: you want good service, but you’re encouraging rapid processing over completeness.
I consulted with a major lending company in Sydney where client relations people were expected to resolve calls within an standard of 4 minutes. Less than five minutes! Try explaining a complicated account situation and providing a complete resolution in less than five minutes.
Impossible.
What happened was that staff would alternatively rush through interactions without adequately grasping the situation, or they’d transfer people to multiple other departments to escape lengthy calls.
Client happiness was abysmal, and employee wellbeing was worse still.
We partnered with management to redesign their assessment metrics to focus on customer satisfaction and first-call resolution rather than call duration. True, this meant less contacts per shift, but client happiness improved significantly, and staff pressure amounts reduced notably.
That takeaway here is that you cannot divorce support quality from the business systems and measurements that govern how staff operate.
Following years in the industry of working in this field, I’m convinced that customer service is not about training staff to be interpersonal sponges who absorb endless amounts of client mistreatment while smiling.
It’s about creating environments, processes, and cultures that enable capable, properly equipped, psychologically resilient employees to solve real issues for appropriate customers while protecting their own professional dignity and the company’s standards.
All approaches else is just expensive window dressing that allows companies seem like they’re solving client relations problems without actually fixing anything.
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