Why Your Support Staff Continues to Letting You Down Even After Continuous Training
Three months ago, I was sitting in one more boring client relations conference in Perth, forced to hear to some expert drone on about the value of “going beyond customer expectations.” Usual presentation, same worn-out phrases, same absolute gap from reality.
I suddenly realised: we’re addressing support training completely incorrectly.
Most courses start with the idea that poor customer service is a training problem. Simply when we could train our staff the correct techniques, everything would automatically improve.
Here’s the thing: with nearly two decades consulting with companies across multiple states, I can tell you that techniques isn’t the issue. The problem is that we’re demanding staff to deliver emotional labour without recognising the cost it takes on their wellbeing.
Let me explain.
Client relations is basically psychological work. You’re not just fixing issues or managing requests. You’re absorbing other people’s frustration, managing their stress, and miraculously keeping your own mental balance while doing it.
Standard training completely misses this dimension.
Rather, it focuses on superficial communications: how to welcome customers, how to apply upbeat terminology, how to follow company procedures. All important elements, but it’s like showing someone to cook by simply describing the principles without ever letting them near the car.
This is a perfect example. Recently, I was working with a major phone company in Adelaide. Their client happiness ratings were awful, and executives was confused. They’d spent hundreds of thousands in extensive training programs. Their staff could repeat business procedures word-for-word, knew all the right scripts, and performed excellently on role-playing exercises.
But once they got on the phones with real customers, the system fell apart.
What was happening? Because real client conversations are complicated, emotional, and full of elements that cannot be covered in a training manual.
Once someone calls raging because their internet’s been offline for 72 hours and they’ve failed to attend important business meetings, they’re not interested in your positive greeting. They demand real validation of their situation and instant action to fix their issue.
Nearly all customer service training instructs employees to adhere to procedures even when those scripts are entirely wrong for the situation. The result is fake exchanges that frustrate people even more and leave team members feeling inadequate.
For this Adelaide company, we ditched 90% of their existing training program and commenced fresh with what I call “Mental Health Training.”
Rather than showing responses, we taught emotional regulation skills. Before concentrating on company policies, we worked on reading people’s mental states and adapting appropriately.
Crucially, we trained employees to identify when they were absorbing a customer’s anger and how to emotionally guard themselves without appearing cold.
The outcomes were instant and significant. Client happiness scores improved by 42% in 60 days. But additionally significantly, staff satisfaction increased dramatically. Staff genuinely started appreciating their work again.
Additionally major challenge I see repeatedly: courses that treat every customers as if they’re rational people who just want better service.
That’s wrong.
After extensive time in this business, I can tell you that roughly 15% of service calls involve people who are fundamentally difficult. They’re not upset because of a valid problem. They’re going through a terrible time, they’re coping with private challenges, or in some cases, they’re just unpleasant people who get satisfaction from creating others endure miserable.
Standard support training won’t prepare employees for these realities. Alternatively, it perpetuates the false idea that with adequate empathy and technique, all person can be turned into a pleased customer.
This creates massive burden on support people and sets them up for disappointment. When they can’t fix an encounter with an impossible customer, they fault themselves rather than recognising that some situations are just unresolvable.
Just one company I worked with in Darwin had implemented a rule that customer service people were not allowed to end a interaction until the client was “totally happy.” Appears logical in principle, but in reality, it meant that staff were regularly stuck in lengthy interactions with people who had no desire of becoming satisfied no matter what of what was offered.
That created a environment of anxiety and inadequacy among client relations people. Employee satisfaction was astronomical, and the small number of people who remained were burned out and bitter.
We modified their procedure to include definite guidelines for when it was appropriate to courteously terminate an pointless conversation. This involved teaching people how to spot the signs of an unreasonable person and offering them with language to politely withdraw when needed.
Customer satisfaction surprisingly got better because people were able to dedicate more valuable time with customers who really required help, rather than being occupied with people who were just seeking to complain.
At this point, let’s talk about the major problem: output metrics and their effect on support effectiveness.
Most organisations evaluate client relations performance using numbers like contact volume, typical conversation duration, and resolution statistics. These metrics completely clash with providing quality customer service.
If you tell customer service staff that they need handle specific quantities of contacts per hour, you’re essentially telling them to rush customers off the line as quickly as possible.
It creates a fundamental opposition: you expect quality service, but you’re encouraging rapid processing over quality.
I consulted with a large bank in Sydney where client relations people were mandated to resolve calls within an standard of four mins. Four minutes! Try describing a detailed account problem and providing a satisfactory resolution in four minutes.
Impossible.
What happened was that staff would either hurry through calls without thoroughly grasping the issue, or they’d redirect customers to various other departments to avoid long interactions.
Customer satisfaction was terrible, and employee satisfaction was worse still.
I worked with leadership to restructure their performance system to emphasise on service quality and single interaction completion rather than speed. Yes, this meant less interactions per shift, but client happiness improved dramatically, and staff pressure degrees dropped notably.
The lesson here is that you cannot divorce customer service effectiveness from the company structures and metrics that influence how employees function.
After all these years of consulting in this field, I’m certain that client relations isn’t about educating people to be emotional absorbers who absorb unlimited amounts of public abuse while being pleasant.
It’s about building organizations, procedures, and cultures that support skilled, adequately prepared, mentally stable people to solve genuine problems for reasonable customers while preserving their own professional dignity and the company’s values.
All approaches else is just wasteful theater that allows companies appear like they’re handling service quality issues without really addressing the real problems.

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