The Actual Reason Your Customer Service Training Fails to Deliver: A Brutal Assessment
Forget everything you’ve been told about customer service training. Following two decades in this business, I can tell you that most of what passes for professional development in this space is absolute garbage.
The reality is this: your staff already know they should be nice to customers. They understand they should smile, say please and thank you, and handle complaints efficiently. What’s missing is how to deal with the emotional labour that comes with interacting with challenging customers constantly.
A few years ago, I was consulting with a major telco company here in Sydney. Their customer satisfaction scores were dreadful, and leadership kept pumping money at traditional training programs. You know the type – mock conversations about welcoming clients, memorising company policies, and countless seminars about “putting yourself in the customer’s shoes.”
Absolute nonsense.
The actual problem wasn’t that team members didn’t know how to be polite. The problem was that they were exhausted from dealing with everyone else’s negativity without any strategies to shield their own emotional state. Consider this: when someone calls to complain about their internet being down for the fourth time this month, they’re not just frustrated about the connection fault. They’re seething because they feel powerless, and your staff member becomes the focus of all that accumulated emotion.
Most training programs completely ignore this emotional reality. Instead, they focus on superficial approaches that sound good in principle but crumble the moment someone starts yelling at your staff.
This is what really helps: teaching your staff stress management methods before you even touch on service delivery skills. I’m talking about mindfulness practices, boundary setting, and most importantly, permission to take breaks when things get too intense.
In that situation, we implemented what I call “Emotional Armour” training. Rather than concentrating on scripts, we taught team members how to identify when they were internalising a customer’s feelings and how to psychologically detach without seeming cold.
The results were incredible. Client feedback scores increased by 35% in three months, but more importantly, team stability fell by 45%. Turns out when your team feel protected to deal with problem interactions, they genuinely enjoy helping customers resolve their problems.
Something else that frustrates me: the fixation with forced cheerfulness. You know what I’m talking about – those programs where they tell employees to “perpetually display a upbeat tone” regardless of the circumstances.
Complete nonsense.
Clients can sense artificial positivity from a mile away. What they really want is authentic care for their issue. Sometimes that means admitting that yes, their problem really does is awful, and you’re going to do whatever it takes to help them resolve it.
I remember working with a big store in Melbourne where management had insisted on that each service calls had to begin with “Hi, thank you for picking [Company Name], how can I make your day amazing?”
Really.
Think about it: you call because your costly appliance broke down a week after the coverage expired, and some poor customer service rep has to act like they can make your day “absolutely fantastic.” That’s offensive.
We eliminated that approach and changed it with basic authenticity training. Train your people to really pay attention to what the person is telling them, validate their problem, and then work on practical solutions.
Client happiness increased immediately.
After years in the industry of training in this area, I’m certain that the biggest issue with customer service training isn’t the learning itself – it’s the impossible expectations we set on customer-facing teams and the absolute absence of systemic support to handle the fundamental problems of poor customer interactions.
Resolve those problems first, and your customer service training will really have a possibility to be effective.

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