The True Reason Your Client Service Training Isn’t Working: A Hard Assessment

Ignore everything you’ve been told about client service training. After eighteen years in this industry, I can tell you that 90% of what passes for professional development in this space is total nonsense.

The reality is this: your employees already know they should be friendly to customers. They understand they should smile, say please and thank you, and fix complaints quickly. What’s missing is how to deal with the emotional labour that comes with dealing with challenging customers day after day.

Back in 2019, I was working with a major phone company here in Sydney. Their service scores were awful, and leadership kept pouring money at standard training programs. You know the type – role playing about welcoming clients, reciting company procedures, and endless sessions about “putting yourself in the customer’s shoes.”

Absolute nonsense.

The real issue wasn’t that team members didn’t know how to be polite. The problem was that they were exhausted from dealing with everyone else’s frustration without any tools to guard their own mental health. Think about it: when someone calls to vent about their internet being down for the fifth time this month, they’re not just upset about the connection fault. They’re livid because they feel powerless, and your team member becomes the recipient of all that pent-up rage.

Most training programs completely ignore this emotional reality. Instead, they focus on surface-level approaches that sound good in principle but fail the moment someone starts screaming at your people.

This is what really helps: teaching your staff psychological protection strategies before you even touch on client relations skills. I’m talking about mindfulness practices, emotional barriers, and most importantly, authorisation to disengage when things get overwhelming.

With that telecommunications company, we started what I call “Psychological Protection” training. Rather than emphasising protocols, we taught team members how to identify when they were internalising a customer’s feelings and how to emotionally step back without appearing unfeeling.

The results were dramatic. Service ratings scores improved by 37% in three months, but more importantly, staff turnover decreased by nearly half. Apparently when your staff feel supported to manage challenging customers, they really like helping customers resolve their problems.

Additionally that drives me mad: the obsession with artificial enthusiasm. You know what I’m talking about – those programs where they tell employees to “perpetually display a upbeat tone” regardless of the circumstances.

Absolute rubbish.

Clients can sense forced cheerfulness from a mile away. What they truly want is real concern for their problem. Sometimes that means acknowledging that yes, their problem actually stinks, and you’re going to do your absolute best to help them sort it out.

I think back to working with a major shopping company in Melbourne where leadership had mandated that each client conversations had to start with “Hi, thank you for picking [Company Name], how can I make your day amazing?”

Seriously.

Think about it: you call because your costly appliance stopped working a week after the guarantee expired, and some unlucky staff member has to pretend they can make your day “amazing.” That’s offensive.

We ditched that policy and substituted it with straightforward genuineness training. Train your staff to genuinely hear to what the client is explaining, recognise their problem, and then work on practical solutions.

Client happiness went up instantly.

Following all these years of consulting in this field, I’m sure that the biggest issue with client relations training isn’t the learning itself – it’s the impossible expectations we place on service people and the total shortage of systemic support to resolve the fundamental problems of bad customer experiences.

Resolve those challenges first, and your client relations training will really have a possibility to succeed.