Why Your Support Staff Continues to Disappointing Despite Continuous Training
Not long ago, I was stuck in yet another boring support workshop in Perth, enduring to some consultant drone on about the value of “exceeding customer hopes.” Usual speech, same overused buzzwords, same absolute separation from the real world.
That’s when it hit me: we’re addressing customer service training totally backwards.
The majority of workshops commence with the assumption that bad customer service is a training issue. If only we could teach our team the proper methods, all problems would automatically be fixed.
What’s actually happening: after nearly two decades training with companies across the country, I can tell you that skills are not the challenge. The problem is that we’re asking people to deliver psychological work without recognising the toll it takes on their mental health.
Let me explain.
Support work is fundamentally psychological work. You’re not just solving issues or managing applications. You’re dealing with other people’s anger, handling their stress, and somehow maintaining your own emotional equilibrium while doing it.
Traditional training totally misses this dimension.
Rather, it concentrates on basic exchanges: how to greet customers, how to employ encouraging words, how to follow business processes. All valuable elements, but it’s like teaching someone to cook by just describing the concepts without ever letting them near the car.
This is a perfect example. Recently, I was working with a major phone company in Adelaide. Their customer satisfaction ratings were awful, and management was baffled. They’d put massive amounts in extensive learning initiatives. Their staff could recite business procedures flawlessly, knew all the right scripts, and scored brilliantly on simulation activities.
But when they got on the calls with actual customers, it all collapsed.
What was happening? Because actual customer interactions are complicated, emotional, and full of variables that cannot be covered in a guidebook.
After someone calls raging because their internet’s been offline for 72 hours and they’ve failed to attend important work calls, they’re not interested in your positive greeting. They want real recognition of their anger and instant steps to resolve their situation.
Most customer service training shows staff to adhere to scripts even when those protocols are completely wrong for the situation. This creates artificial exchanges that frustrate people even more and leave staff experiencing helpless.
For this Adelaide business, we ditched most of their existing training program and started again with what I call “Psychological Truth Training.”
Instead of showing responses, we taught emotional regulation techniques. Rather than focusing on organisational rules, we worked on understanding client feelings and responding suitably.
Crucially, we trained team members to recognise when they were absorbing a customer’s anger and how to mentally protect themselves without becoming cold.
The results were immediate and remarkable. Customer satisfaction numbers increased by over 40% in 60 days. But more notably, staff turnover increased significantly. Staff genuinely commenced appreciating their roles again.
Something else important problem I see all the time: courses that treat all customers as if they’re reasonable individuals who just require better service.
This is unrealistic.
Following decades in this field, I can tell you that approximately one in six of service calls involve individuals who are essentially problematic. They’re not frustrated because of a valid service issue. They’re experiencing a bad time, they’re struggling with private challenges, or in some cases, they’re just nasty people who get satisfaction from making others endure uncomfortable.
Conventional customer service training won’t equip staff for these encounters. Alternatively, it maintains the myth that with sufficient compassion and ability, every person can be transformed into a pleased person.
This places enormous stress on client relations teams and sets them up for frustration. When they cannot solve an interaction with an impossible customer, they criticise themselves rather than realising that some interactions are plainly impossible.
One business I worked with in Darwin had introduced a policy that customer service staff couldn’t terminate a interaction until the client was “entirely pleased.” Sounds sensible in concept, but in practice, it meant that employees were regularly stuck in hour-long interactions with customers who had no plan of being satisfied regardless of what was given.
It caused a culture of fear and helplessness among support staff. Employee satisfaction was terrible, and the remaining people who continued were emotionally drained and resentful.
The team updated their approach to include clear rules for when it was appropriate to courteously conclude an unproductive conversation. This involved training staff how to spot the signs of an unreasonable customer and offering them with phrases to courteously disengage when needed.
Customer satisfaction remarkably improved because employees were allowed to focus more productive time with customers who actually wanted help, rather than being tied up with customers who were just seeking to vent.
Currently, let’s discuss the elephant in the room: output measurements and their effect on customer service standards.
The majority of businesses measure customer service success using metrics like interaction numbers, standard call time, and resolution percentages. These targets totally clash with offering good customer service.
If you instruct client relations representatives that they must handle specific quantities of calls per hour, you’re basically instructing them to speed through clients off the line as rapidly as feasible.
This results in a basic opposition: you need excellent service, but you’re encouraging quickness over thoroughness.
I consulted with a significant bank in Sydney where support representatives were required to complete calls within an typical of 4 minutes. Less than five minutes! Try explaining a detailed banking issue and giving a complete solution in four minutes.
Impossible.
What happened was that representatives would either rush through conversations missing properly understanding the situation, or they’d redirect clients to various additional areas to escape long interactions.
Customer satisfaction was terrible, and staff wellbeing was at rock bottom.
We partnered with management to redesign their assessment system to emphasise on customer satisfaction and initial contact completion rather than quickness. Certainly, this meant reduced interactions per hour, but customer satisfaction improved remarkably, and representative pressure degrees dropped considerably.
That lesson here is that you can’t separate client relations standards from the company systems and targets that control how people function.
With decades of experience of training in this field, I’m sure that customer service isn’t about teaching staff to be emotional sponges who endure constant levels of customer abuse while staying positive.
Effective service is about creating systems, frameworks, and atmospheres that support competent, properly equipped, mentally resilient employees to solve real issues for reasonable customers while maintaining their own professional dignity and company business’s standards.
All approaches else is just wasteful performance that makes organizations appear like they’re handling client relations challenges without actually addressing underlying causes.
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