The Actual Reason Your Client Service Training Fails to Deliver: A Hard Assessment
Throw out everything you’ve been told about client service training. Over fifteen years in this business, I can tell you that most of what passes for professional development in this space is absolute garbage.
Let me be brutally honest: your staff already know they should be polite to customers. They realise they should smile, say please and thank you, and handle complaints promptly. What they don’t know is how to deal with the emotional labour that comes with working with challenging customers constantly.
Recently, I was working with a major phone company here in Sydney. Their client happiness scores were awful, and management kept pouring money at standard training programs. You know the type – practice scenarios about greeting customers, reciting company policies, and countless workshops about “putting yourself in the customer’s shoes.”
Total rubbish.
The actual problem wasn’t that employees didn’t know how to be polite. The problem was that they were burned out from taking on everyone else’s anger without any methods to protect their own emotional state. Here’s the thing: when someone calls to rage about their internet being down for the third time this month, they’re not just angry about the connection fault. They’re furious because they feel ignored, and your customer service rep becomes the focus of all that accumulated emotion.
Most training programs entirely miss this mental reality. Instead, they focus on surface-level skills that sound good in theory but fall apart the moment someone starts yelling at your staff.
Here’s what actually works: teaching your team stress management strategies before you even touch on customer interaction techniques. I’m talking about relaxation techniques, psychological protection, and most importantly, permission to disengage when things get too intense.
With that telecommunications company, we started what I call “Psychological Protection” training. Before concentrating on protocols, we taught team members how to spot when they were absorbing a customer’s emotional state and how to emotionally distance themselves without coming across as disconnected.
The results were remarkable. Client feedback scores rose by 37% in three months, but more importantly, employee retention dropped by 50%. Turns out when your people feel protected to deal with problem interactions, they really like helping customers fix their concerns.
Here’s another thing that frustrates me: the obsession with fake positivity. You know what I’m talking about – those programs where they tell employees to “constantly display a positive attitude” regardless of the situation.
Total garbage.
People can feel fake positivity from a kilometre away. What they actually want is real concern for their issue. Sometimes that means acknowledging that yes, their situation genuinely stinks, and you’re going to do your absolute best to support them sort it out.
I think back to working with a big shopping company in Melbourne where leadership had required that every customer interactions had to start with “Hello, thank you for selecting [Company Name], how can I make your day wonderful?”
Actually.
Can you imagine: you call because your expensive device broke down two days after the guarantee expired, and some unlucky employee has to pretend they can make your day “wonderful.” It’s insulting.
We scrapped that script and changed it with basic honesty training. Teach your people to genuinely hear to what the client is telling them, recognise their problem, and then work on practical solutions.
Client happiness improved instantly.
After all these years of working in this area, I’m certain that the largest problem with support training isn’t the training itself – it’s the impossible demands we set on front-line teams and the absolute lack of organisational support to address the fundamental problems of poor customer service.
Address those problems first, and your customer service training will really have a opportunity to be effective.
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