The Reason Your Client Relations Team Won't Stop Letting You Down Despite Constant Training Recently, I was stuck in another tedious customer service workshop in Perth, enduring to some expert drone on about the significance of “going beyond customer hopes.” Typical presentation, same tired phrases, same complete gap from the real world. I suddenly realised: we're addressing support training entirely backwards. Nearly all training programs begin with the belief that poor customer service is a training problem. Just if we could show our people the proper techniques, all problems would suddenly improve. The reality is: following many years working with businesses across the country, I can tell you that techniques are not the challenge. The problem is that we're asking employees to provide emotional labour without recognising the toll it takes on their emotional state. Let me explain. Support work is essentially emotional labour. You're not just resolving technical problems or managing requests. You're absorbing other people's disappointment, handling their anxiety, and miraculously maintaining your own psychological stability while doing it. Standard training totally overlooks this aspect. Rather, it concentrates on surface-level exchanges: how to greet customers, how to use encouraging words, how to stick to company procedures. All useful stuff, but it's like training someone to swim by only talking about the principles without ever letting them close to the water. Let me share a typical example. A while back, I was working with a large telecommunications company in Adelaide. Their service quality numbers were awful, and management was puzzled. They'd invested significant money in thorough training programs. Their team could recite organisational guidelines flawlessly, knew all the correct scripts, and scored excellently on role-playing scenarios. But once they got on the calls with real customers, the system fell apart. What was happening? Because actual customer interactions are messy, charged, and full of factors that can't be addressed in a guidebook. When someone calls raging because their internet's been offline for three days and they've failed to attend important professional appointments, they're not focused in your upbeat greeting. They demand real recognition of their situation and immediate solutions to fix their situation. Most support training teaches people to stick to protocols even when those protocols are completely unsuitable for the circumstances. The result is fake exchanges that annoy customers even more and leave staff experiencing helpless. For this Adelaide organisation, we ditched the majority of their previous training program and began fresh with what I call “Psychological Truth Training.” Before teaching responses, we showed psychological coping methods. Rather than concentrating on business procedures, we worked on understanding client feelings and responding effectively. Crucially, we trained staff to recognise when they were internalising a customer's negative emotions and how to psychologically protect themselves without seeming cold. The results were immediate and dramatic. Service quality numbers rose by over 40% in eight weeks. But even more importantly, employee turnover increased dramatically. Staff genuinely began appreciating their work again. Additionally important challenge I see constantly: workshops that handle all customers as if they're rational people who just need enhanced communication. It's unrealistic. With decades in this business, I can tell you that roughly one in six of client contacts involve people who are fundamentally difficult. They're not frustrated because of a legitimate problem. They're having a bad time, they're struggling with private challenges, or in some cases, they're just nasty people who enjoy making others experience uncomfortable. Standard client relations training doesn't equip staff for these realities. Alternatively, it perpetuates the myth that with adequate compassion and technique, all customer can be turned into a pleased customer. This puts enormous pressure on client relations teams and sets them up for failure. When they are unable to fix an interaction with an impossible customer, they fault themselves rather than understanding that some situations are simply unresolvable. One organisation I worked with in Darwin had implemented a policy that client relations representatives couldn't end a interaction until the person was “entirely pleased.” Seems logical in theory, but in actual application, it meant that staff were frequently held in lengthy calls with customers who had no intention of being satisfied irrespective of what was given. It caused a environment of fear and powerlessness among support staff. Turnover was terrible, and the few people who remained were burned out and bitter. We updated their procedure to add definite guidelines for when it was okay to professionally end an unproductive call. This involved training staff how to spot the warning signals of an difficult person and providing them with scripts to professionally disengage when necessary. Customer satisfaction surprisingly increased because employees were free to dedicate more valuable time with clients who really needed help, rather than being occupied with individuals who were just seeking to vent. At this point, let's address the elephant in the room: productivity metrics and their impact on support standards. Most organisations evaluate client relations effectiveness using metrics like interaction quantity, typical call duration, and resolution rates. These targets completely clash with providing good customer service. If you require client relations staff that they have to handle specific quantities of calls per shift, you're fundamentally instructing them to rush people off the phone as fast as feasible. It causes a fundamental opposition: you need excellent service, but you're incentivising speed over completeness. I worked with a large lending company in Sydney where customer service staff were required to complete contacts within an average of 4 minutes. Less than five minutes! Try explaining a detailed account problem and providing a adequate resolution in four minutes. Can't be done. The result was that representatives would alternatively hurry through calls lacking adequately grasping the situation, or they'd redirect people to various other teams to avoid lengthy conversations. Client happiness was abysmal, and representative satisfaction was even worse. I partnered with leadership to modify their performance system to emphasise on customer satisfaction and first-call resolution rather than call duration. Certainly, this meant reduced interactions per shift, but customer satisfaction rose significantly, and employee anxiety degrees decreased notably. This lesson here is that you won't be able to divorce customer service quality from the business structures and targets that control how people work. With decades of experience of training in this area, I'm sure that client relations doesn't come from about educating staff to be emotional sponges who absorb constant quantities of customer mistreatment while smiling. Quality support is about creating organizations, procedures, and workplaces that support capable, adequately prepared, psychologically healthy people to resolve real challenges for reasonable people while preserving their own professional dignity and the company's integrity. All approaches else is just costly theater that allows companies feel like they're addressing client relations problems without genuinely addressing underlying causes.
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