People in my life know what I do for a living. Which means they tell me every customer service story they’ve ever had. Every flight delay, every chat with an agent who can’t help, every “let me transfer you to another department.”
My sister called the other day—frustrated after trying to return something online. She said, “These people just need more training.” That’s the go-to explanation. Every customer service failure, apparently, can be fixed with “better training.”
But here’s the truth: training isn’t the villain or the savior. It’s a scapegoat.
Yes, some training is bad. Boring PowerPoints. Endless memorization. Trainers reading slides like it’s a hostage situation. But the idea that “if we just trained them better” everything would be fixed—that’s fantasy.
Because training doesn’t live in a vacuum. You can train someone perfectly and still set them up to fail. You can’t coach your way out of bad tools, outdated processes, or customers who are more informed than your own systems.
Here’s how I see it.
If you walk into most contact centers today, 80% of the training time is spent teaching products—how to find things, how to navigate systems. Only a sliver goes into what actually matters: understanding people. The “why” behind a customer’s question. The ability to listen, empathize, and connect.
That’s the hardest part to teach—and the easiest part to ignore.
AI is already making the product side easier. Soon, every rep will have an instant cheat sheet of every price, every policy, every SKU. The hard part—the human part—will be what separates a good company from a forgettable one. Soft skills (or “tough skills,” as some call them) are the new battleground.
Here’s what most companies miss about training:
- Training should teach people to fish, not memorize the lake. Don’t test employees on how much they can recall. Test how quickly they can find, interpret, and apply.
- Training should start with why. Not just what the policy is, but why it exists, and how to explain that to a human being who’s already annoyed.
- Training should involve, not lecture. “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” Ben Franklin said that centuries ago. Still true.
- Training should never stop. The best training happens after you hit the floor—through coaching, nesting, and real conversations about what’s actually happening with customers.
And maybe most important: the people designing the training should sit in it. Every director, every VP who loves to say “we need better training” should go spend a day in the classroom. Listen to what’s being taught. You’ll realize half the time, the rep isn’t confused—the company is.
You can’t train your way out of chaos. You can only train your way toward clarity.
Training isn’t broken because trainers are bad. It’s broken because we’ve forgotten what it’s for. Not to produce perfect robots, but capable humans—people who can think, adapt, and connect.
And that’s the kind of training customers actually feel.
Amas Tenumah is a digital philosopher, keynote speaker, customer service thought leader, and long-time CCNG member/content contributor. Amas’s thoughts are featured on NPR, NBC, Fox-business and other outlets. He has spent over 20 years in customer service and now advises executives on service modernization. Amas is also an author and has written books including Waiting for Service, The Curated Experience, The Joyful Stoic, and No One Wants Customer Service.
