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The Uncomfortable Truth About Why Your Team Keeps Stuffing Up Customer Calls (And It's Not What You Think)
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Here's what nobody wants to admit: your customer service training is probably making things worse.
I've spent the last seventeen years watching Australian businesses throw money at communication skills workshops while their customer satisfaction scores continue to tank. The problem isn't that your staff can't communicate. The problem is that you're teaching them to be robots.
The Script Epidemic
Walk into any call centre in Melbourne, Brisbane, or Perth right now and you'll hear the same robotic dialogue. "Thank you for calling, my name is Sarah, how can I provide you with excellent service today?" It's painful. Your customers know it's scripted. Your staff hate saying it. Yet somehow, management thinks this is professionalism.
I was guilty of this myself back in 2018 when I was running training programs for a major telecommunications company (let's just say they rhyme with "Belstra"). Spent three months developing the "perfect" customer service script. Thought I was brilliant.
Wrong.
Customer complaints actually increased by 23% in the first quarter after implementation. Turns out, when you sound like a chatbot, people get frustrated faster. Who would've thought?
What Actually Works (Brace Yourself)
The companies getting customer service right aren't following scripts. They're doing the opposite. They're hiring for personality and training for product knowledge, not the other way around.
Take Bunnings, for instance. Their staff don't follow scripts, but they know their stuff. You ask about deck stain, and Gary from hardware will tell you about the weather this weekend, recommend three different products based on your specific timber, and probably throw in a tip about when to apply it. That's not scripted. That's knowledge combined with genuine human interaction.
Here's the thing that makes traditional trainers uncomfortable: authentic communication can't be scripted. It can only be encouraged.
The Empathy Theatre Problem
This brings me to my biggest gripe with modern customer service training. Everyone's obsessed with "active listening" and "empathy statements." You know the ones: "I can hear that you're frustrated," "I understand how important this is to you," "Let me see what I can do for you."
Newsflash: customers aren't idiots. They can spot fake empathy from space.
Real empathy isn't about perfect phrases. It's about actually caring enough to solve their problem instead of transferring them to six different departments. It's about remembering that the person on the other end of the line is having a genuinely bad day, not just ticking boxes on your call quality scorecard.
I learned this the hard way during the NBN rollout chaos. Was consulting for a company that shall remain nameless, and their customer service scores were abysmal. Not because their staff weren't following the empathy script perfectly—they were. Because the script was meaningless when customers had been without internet for three weeks.
The Knowledge Gap Nobody Talks About
Here's what really grinds my gears: we spend hours teaching people how to say sorry, but zero time teaching them how to actually fix problems.
Your customer rings up about a billing error. Your perfectly trained staff member expresses empathy beautifully, acknowledges the frustration appropriately, but then has to put them on hold for twenty minutes to figure out what a pro-rata charge is.
This is backwards.
Train them on your systems first. Teach them your products inside and out. Give them the authority to actually solve problems. Then worry about whether they're using the "right" tone of voice.
The Authorisation Nightmare
Speaking of authority—this one drives me mental. You've got customer service representatives who can't authorise a $30 refund without three levels of approval, but we wonder why customers get frustrated during calls.
I was working with a retail chain in Sydney recently (let's call them "Not-Quite-Myer") where staff needed management approval for any discount over $20. The average customer service call took 34 minutes. Not because the staff were incompetent, but because they spent 28 minutes waiting for a supervisor to approve a $25 store credit.
Madness.
Give your people the power to solve problems within reasonable limits. A $100 goodwill gesture to keep a loyal customer happy is cheaper than losing them to your competitor who can make decisions on the spot.
The Personality Paradox
Here's where I'll lose some of you: personality matters more than qualifications for customer-facing roles.
I'd rather hire someone who naturally connects with people and train them on product knowledge than hire someone with a customer service certificate who treats every interaction like a checkbox exercise. You can teach someone about your warranty policy. You can't teach someone to genuinely care about helping others.
Yet most recruitment processes focus on credentials and previous experience rather than natural communication ability and problem-solving instincts. We're hiring backwards and then wondering why our customer service fundamentals training isn't working.
The Measurement Trap
Call monitoring is killing customer service. There, I said it.
When your staff know they're being scored on "call adherence to script" and "use of empathy statements," guess what happens? They focus on ticking those boxes instead of actually helping the customer.
I've listened to hundreds of monitored calls where staff members awkwardly shoehorn required phrases into conversations that don't need them. Customer asks a simple product question, gets a scripted response about appreciation and understanding before getting the actual answer they needed.
It's like judging a chef based on whether they say "bon appétit" instead of whether the food tastes good.
What High-Performing Teams Actually Do
The companies that consistently score high on customer satisfaction surveys aren't the ones with the best scripts. They're the ones with the clearest escalation processes, the most knowledgeable staff, and the fastest problem resolution.
I worked with a small software company in Adelaide last year—about 30 employees, nothing fancy. Their customer service rating was consistently above 4.8 stars. No scripts. No mandatory empathy statements. Just well-trained staff who understood the product and had clear authority to solve common problems.
Their secret? Every customer service person spent two weeks in the technical support department before starting on the phones. They understood how the software actually worked, not just how to transfer calls when things got complicated.
The Training That Actually Matters
If you want to improve your customer service, stop focusing on communication style and start focusing on competence.
Train your staff on:
- Product knowledge (obviously)
- Your internal systems and how to navigate them quickly
- Common problem-solving approaches
- When and how to escalate (with clear guidelines)
- Your return/refund/goodwill policies (and their authority levels)
The communication skills will develop naturally when people actually know how to help.
Why This Matters More Now
Customer expectations have changed dramatically since 2020. People are used to self-service options, instant chat responses, and 24/7 support. When they actually pick up the phone to call you, it's because they have a problem they couldn't solve online.
This means your phone support is now handling the complex stuff. The edge cases. The frustrated customers who've already tried everything else.
Sending them through a scripted greeting and empathy routine before getting to the actual problem-solving is like making someone fill out a form before you'll treat their broken leg.
The Real Solution
Stop training people to sound like customer service representatives. Train them to be problem solvers who happen to work in customer service.
The difference is everything.
When someone calls with a billing issue, don't train your staff to say "I understand your frustration with your billing." Train them to say "Let me pull up your account and see exactly what's happened here."
Action first, empathy second. Always.
Because here's the thing customers actually want: their problem solved quickly by someone who knows what they're doing. Everything else is just performance art.
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