How Come Your Support Staff Continues to Disappointing Despite Continuous Training
Not long ago, I was stuck in one more boring client relations workshop in Perth, listening to some trainer drone on about the value of “surpassing customer hopes.” Usual presentation, same tired phrases, same total disconnect from the real world.
That’s when it hit me: we’re approaching customer service training entirely backwards.
The majority of workshops commence with the assumption that poor customer service is a training problem. If only we could show our team the proper approaches, all problems would suddenly get better.
The reality is: with nearly two decades working with organisations across multiple states, I can tell you that techniques isn’t the challenge. The problem is that we’re expecting staff to deliver mental effort without admitting the toll it takes on their wellbeing.
Let me explain.
Support work is basically mental effort. You’re not just resolving issues or processing requests. You’re dealing with other people’s disappointment, controlling their anxiety, and somehow keeping your own emotional equilibrium while doing it.
Standard training completely overlooks this dimension.
Instead, it concentrates on surface-level communications: how to greet customers, how to employ positive language, how to stick to business processes. All valuable things, but it’s like showing someone to drive by simply talking about the concepts without ever letting them close to the kitchen.
Here’s a perfect example. Last year, I was working with a large phone company in Adelaide. Their customer satisfaction numbers were abysmal, and leadership was puzzled. They’d spent hundreds of thousands in extensive education courses. Their people could repeat organisational guidelines flawlessly, knew all the proper phrases, and performed perfectly on role-playing scenarios.
But once they got on the phones with real customers, everything collapsed.
The reason? Because actual customer interactions are complicated, charged, and full of elements that won’t be covered in a training manual.
After someone calls screaming because their internet’s been down for 72 hours and they’ve missed crucial professional appointments, they’re not interested in your positive introduction. They need real acknowledgment of their frustration and rapid solutions to solve their problem.
Most client relations training instructs people to adhere to protocols even when those scripts are completely unsuitable for the situation. The result is artificial interactions that anger people even more and leave team members experiencing inadequate.
At that Adelaide business, we ditched 90% of their current training program and began fresh with what I call “Emotional Reality Training.”
Before showing responses, we trained psychological coping skills. Instead of focusing on organisational rules, we focused on reading client feelings and responding suitably.
Crucially, we showed team members to spot when they were internalising a customer’s negative emotions and how to emotionally guard themselves without appearing cold.
The changes were instant and dramatic. Customer satisfaction numbers improved by nearly half in eight weeks. But additionally importantly, staff retention increased dramatically. People actually commenced liking their jobs again.
Additionally major problem I see all the time: training programs that treat all customers as if they’re rational individuals who just require better communication.
This is naive.
After extensive time in this business, I can tell you that about one in six of service calls involve people who are fundamentally difficult. They’re not upset because of a legitimate problem. They’re experiencing a terrible time, they’re coping with individual issues, or in some cases, they’re just difficult people who get satisfaction from causing others feel bad.
Conventional customer service training won’t equip employees for these situations. Instead, it perpetuates the myth that with adequate empathy and skill, all client can be turned into a satisfied client.
That creates huge burden on support staff and sets them up for disappointment. When they cannot fix an situation with an unreasonable person, they fault themselves rather than realising that some situations are simply unresolvable.
One business I worked with in Darwin had introduced a policy that support staff couldn’t conclude a conversation until the person was “entirely pleased.” Appears sensible in principle, but in actual application, it meant that people were often stuck in hour-long conversations with customers who had no desire of becoming satisfied irrespective of what was offered.
This caused a atmosphere of fear and powerlessness among support people. Turnover was extremely high, and the small number of staff who stayed were exhausted and resentful.
I updated their approach to incorporate clear guidelines for when it was okay to politely end an pointless interaction. It meant teaching staff how to identify the signs of an impossible customer and offering them with phrases to courteously exit when appropriate.
Client happiness actually got better because people were able to focus more valuable time with customers who actually needed help, rather than being occupied with people who were just trying to vent.
Now, let’s discuss the obvious issue: output targets and their effect on support quality.
Nearly all organisations assess support performance using metrics like call quantity, standard interaction length, and completion statistics. These targets totally contradict with delivering excellent customer service.
If you instruct support people that they need manage a certain number of interactions per hour, you’re essentially telling them to hurry people off the call as fast as possible.
It causes a essential contradiction: you need quality service, but you’re encouraging rapid processing over completeness.
I consulted with a significant bank in Sydney where customer service people were required to resolve calls within an standard of four mins. Less than five minutes! Try explaining a complicated banking issue and offering a satisfactory solution in 240 seconds.
Can’t be done.
Consequently was that representatives would either hurry through interactions missing thoroughly grasping the issue, or they’d pass customers to multiple other areas to escape extended calls.
Service quality was terrible, and staff satisfaction was worse still.
We worked with management to modify their assessment measurements to focus on client happiness and initial contact completion rather than call duration. True, this meant reduced contacts per hour, but customer satisfaction improved dramatically, and employee pressure amounts reduced substantially.
This lesson here is that you cannot separate support standards from the organisational frameworks and targets that control how staff operate.
Following years in the industry of working in this space, I’m convinced that customer service is not about teaching employees to be emotional sponges who absorb endless amounts of customer abuse while staying positive.
Effective service is about establishing organizations, frameworks, and cultures that enable capable, well-supported, psychologically stable employees to solve genuine issues for legitimate clients while maintaining their own mental health and company organization’s values.
All approaches else is just wasteful performance that helps companies seem like they’re solving client relations issues without genuinely addressing the real problems.

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