The Real Reason Your Customer Care Training Fails to Deliver: A Honest Assessment
Ignore everything you’ve been told about customer care training. After eighteen years in this business, I can tell you that most of what passes for employee education in this space is complete rubbish.
Let me be brutally honest: your team already know they should be nice to customers. They understand they should smile, say please and thank you, and handle complaints quickly. What they don’t know is how to manage the mental strain that comes with dealing with challenging customers day after day.
A few years ago, I was working with a major telco company here in Sydney. Their customer satisfaction scores were dreadful, and management kept pouring money at conventional training programs. You know the type – mock conversations about welcoming clients, reciting company guidelines, and repetitive sessions about “putting yourself in the customer’s shoes.”
Absolute nonsense.
The core challenge wasn’t that staff didn’t know how to be polite. The problem was that they were exhausted from absorbing everyone else’s frustration without any methods to guard their own emotional state. Here’s the thing: when someone calls to rage about their internet being down for the fourth time this month, they’re not just frustrated about the service problem. They’re seething because they feel powerless, and your team member becomes the target of all that pent-up emotion.
Most training programs totally overlook this mental reality. Instead, they focus on basic techniques that sound good in theory but fail the moment someone starts yelling at your people.
The solution is this: teaching your team stress management techniques before you even discuss customer interaction approaches. I’m talking about mindfulness practices, boundary setting, and most importantly, authorisation to disengage when things get heated.
At that Sydney telco, we introduced what I call “Emotional Armour” training. Rather than focusing on scripts, we taught staff how to spot when they were internalising a customer’s emotional state and how to psychologically detach without seeming unfeeling.
The results were remarkable. Customer satisfaction scores rose by 40% in three months, but more importantly, employee retention decreased by 45%. Apparently when your people feel equipped to handle difficult situations, they really appreciate helping customers fix their concerns.
Additionally that drives me mad: the focus with artificial enthusiasm. You know what I’m talking about – those workshops where they tell people to “constantly keep a positive attitude” regardless of the situation.
Complete nonsense.
Clients can feel forced positivity from a kilometre away. What they actually want is authentic concern for their issue. Sometimes that means admitting that yes, their situation really does is awful, and you’re going to do your absolute best to assist them resolve it.
I remember working with a big shopping company in Melbourne where leadership had insisted on that all customer interactions had to open with “Hello, thank you for choosing [Company Name], how can I make your day absolutely fantastic?”
Really.
Think about it: you call because your expensive device failed a week after the warranty ran out, and some poor employee has to pretend they can make your day “wonderful.” It’s insulting.
We scrapped that approach and replaced it with simple genuineness training. Show your people to actually listen to what the client is telling them, acknowledge their frustration, and then concentrate on actual help.
Client happiness went up instantly.
After decades of experience of consulting in this space, I’m convinced that the largest problem with support training isn’t the learning itself – it’s the unattainable expectations we set on customer-facing staff and the complete shortage of organisational support to handle the underlying issues of terrible customer experiences.
Fix those problems first, and your support training will actually have a possibility to work.

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