The Reason Your Customer Service Team Keeps Disappointing Regardless of Endless Training
Recently, I was stuck in another boring client relations seminar in Perth, forced to hear to some expert drone on about the value of “exceeding customer expectations.” Same old talk, same worn-out terminology, same absolute disconnect from the real world.
I suddenly realised: we’re handling customer service training completely wrong.
Nearly all courses start with the belief that bad customer service is a training problem. Simply when we could teach our staff the proper approaches, everything would suddenly improve.
Here’s the thing: following seventeen years consulting with companies across multiple states, I can tell you that knowledge aren’t the problem. The problem is that we’re asking employees to perform psychological work without recognising the cost it takes on their mental health.
Allow me to clarify.
Client relations is essentially mental effort. You’re not just resolving issues or processing requests. You’re dealing with other people’s frustration, handling their stress, and miraculously preserving your own emotional equilibrium while doing it.
Conventional training entirely ignores this reality.
Rather, it focuses on basic communications: how to welcome customers, how to apply encouraging words, how to stick to business processes. All useful things, but it’s like training someone to drive by only explaining the theory without ever letting them close to the car.
This is a classic example. Last year, I was working with a significant telecommunications company in Adelaide. Their service quality numbers were awful, and executives was confused. They’d spent hundreds of thousands in comprehensive training programs. Their team could recite business procedures word-for-word, knew all the correct responses, and performed excellently on role-playing activities.
But after they got on the customer interactions with actual customers, it all broke down.
The reason? Because actual customer interactions are messy, intense, and full of variables that won’t be handled in a training manual.
When someone calls yelling because their internet’s been broken for ages and they’ve lost important business meetings, they’re not focused in your upbeat greeting. They want real validation of their frustration and instant action to solve their problem.
The majority of client relations training shows staff to stick to procedures even when those protocols are entirely unsuitable for the context. It causes fake interactions that frustrate people even more and leave team members feeling helpless.
With this Adelaide company, we eliminated the majority of their previous training program and commenced over with what I call “Mental Health Training.”
Before training scripts, we trained emotional regulation methods. Instead of emphasising on business procedures, we focused on understanding people’s mental states and responding appropriately.
Crucially, we taught team members to identify when they were internalising a customer’s frustration and how to emotionally shield themselves without seeming unfeeling.
The changes were immediate and dramatic. Customer satisfaction scores increased by 42% in 60 days. But more notably, staff satisfaction improved dramatically. People really began enjoying their jobs again.
Here’s another major problem I see constantly: workshops that treat every customers as if they’re rational people who just need improved communication.
That’s naive.
After years in this industry, I can tell you that approximately a significant portion of service calls involve people who are basically problematic. They’re not upset because of a real service issue. They’re having a awful week, they’re dealing with private challenges, or in some cases, they’re just nasty humans who get satisfaction from creating others endure miserable.
Traditional support training fails to prepare staff for these realities. Alternatively, it maintains the myth that with adequate empathy and skill, every customer can be converted into a happy person.
This puts enormous pressure on support staff and sets them up for frustration. When they cannot solve an encounter with an unreasonable client, they fault themselves rather than realising that some situations are just impossible.
Just one business I worked with in Darwin had implemented a policy that support people couldn’t terminate a interaction until the person was “totally happy.” Appears reasonable in principle, but in actual application, it meant that employees were often trapped in extended interactions with individuals who had no intention of getting satisfied no matter what of what was given.
That caused a culture of stress and helplessness among support people. Staff retention was astronomical, and the few staff who continued were emotionally drained and bitter.
I changed their approach to include clear protocols for when it was acceptable to professionally terminate an unproductive call. It meant showing staff how to identify the warning signals of an impossible person and providing them with scripts to courteously disengage when appropriate.
Customer satisfaction remarkably increased because staff were able to dedicate more valuable time with clients who genuinely needed help, rather than being stuck with people who were just trying to argue.
Currently, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: output targets and their effect on client relations effectiveness.
Most organisations assess customer service performance using metrics like call volume, average conversation time, and closure rates. These targets totally contradict with offering good customer service.
When you instruct customer service staff that they must manage set amounts of interactions per hour, you’re fundamentally requiring them to hurry people off the phone as quickly as feasible.
It results in a basic conflict: you expect quality service, but you’re rewarding speed over quality.
I worked with a large financial institution in Sydney where support representatives were required to complete calls within an average of 4 minutes. 240 seconds! Try walking through a complicated account issue and offering a satisfactory solution in less than five minutes.
Impossible.
The result was that staff would either hurry through calls lacking adequately understanding the problem, or they’d pass clients to multiple additional departments to prevent extended conversations.
Service quality was terrible, and staff wellbeing was even worse.
The team collaborated with executives to redesign their assessment measurements to focus on service quality and first-call completion rather than quickness. Certainly, this meant fewer interactions per day, but customer satisfaction rose significantly, and staff stress amounts reduced substantially.
This takeaway here is that you won’t be able to disconnect support standards from the company frameworks and metrics that govern how employees operate.
Following years in the industry of training in this space, I’m convinced that customer service is not about teaching employees to be interpersonal victims who endure endless amounts of public abuse while being pleasant.
It’s about establishing environments, processes, and workplaces that enable capable, well-supported, emotionally resilient staff to fix genuine issues for legitimate customers while protecting their own mental health and company business’s values.
Everything else is just costly theater that allows companies feel like they’re addressing customer service issues without really fixing underlying causes.

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