The One-Size-Fits-None Problem
Three types of agents sit in every training session.
The naturals who already excel at empathy learn nothing new. The frustrated ones who recognise their gap but lack support to change feel more inadequate. The oblivious agents who don’t see the relevance think it’s a waste of time.
Meanwhile, operational performance gets cannibalised by having people off the day job.
So why does management keep running this approach when they can clearly see it’s not working?
Because managers aren’t L&D professionals. They only know what they know. Many went through this process themselves and believe “it was good enough for me, so it’s good enough for them.”
Add to this: training providers make excellent money rebadging courses and pumping them out repeatedly. They’re being told by ‘experts’ that this is the right way.
Who Benefits from The Theatre
The winners? Consultancies with their quick-fix courses.
UK contact centres face attrition rates averaging 26%. Roughly one-third of trained agents will have left within months.
The combination of attrition and poor learning retention means contact centres have perpetual “need” for the same training.
The contact centre wastes money. Serious money.
Replacing a single contact centre agent costs an average of £7,500 in retraining alone. For a 150-agent operation with 10% monthly attrition, that’s £1.35 million annually just cycling through the same training theatre.
Agents miss out because the training isn’t embedded, and learnings don’t stick. Customers get no better experience. The brand suffers.
Yet no one’s brave enough to ask: “We trained these people six months ago and they’ve all left. Maybe we’re solving the wrong problem?”
No one wants to admit they’ve wasted money. And people genuinely don’t know a better way.
The Biological Mismatch
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: training for behaviours only reinforces the logical aspect of thinking.
It reinforces theory people already know.
Within the first five minutes, any good trainer can have the room nodding along that empathy is important.
But when the day job hits, emotion drives 80% of behaviour compared to 20% driven by logic.
When an agent faces an angry customer, their brain doesn’t reach for the laminated card. The amygdala detects danger and signals the hypothalamus, which activates the stress response.
Fight looks like an agent arguing back or being defensive, usually in tone rather than words.
Flight looks like the agent wanting to get off the call as quickly as possible.
Training tells agents to show empathy and build rapport whilst their brain is in survival mode.
That’s a biological mismatch no two-day course can address.
What Actually Changes Behaviour
Humans hold onto or let go of beliefs depending on the narrative they believe to be true.
When I hear stories of empathy making a difference, when I hear about genuine rapport helping my colleagues, my brain starts thinking “I should do the same.”
The stories shift my brain to believing it could benefit me. My behaviours begin to align.
What does this mean for your contact centre?
In team meetings and huddles, talk about these behaviours. Managers facilitate conversations that share good stories and generate ideas. Positively framed, agent-led conversations shift thinking and therefore behaviours.
Performance and KPIs follow.
Despite companies investing heavily in corporate training, only tangible results emerge from 10% of that spend.
The Goldfish Problem
A two-day training programme on its own is like taking a goldfish out of a bowl of dirty water, cleaning it, then putting it back.
Guess what happens to the fish.
Training providers don’t need to abandon their content. They need to focus on the embedding phase more than the initiation energy of the training.
Behaviour change is a lag metric. It takes time, usually at least 12 weeks.
That could feel like an eternity in contact centre terms where operations are measured hour-by-hour. But the results come when you commit to the process.
For every 1% uplift in engagement, you get a 2% uplift in productivity.
Think of going to the gym. No one expects a six-pack after one workout.
Building Capability, Not Dependency
Here’s what makes this approach fundamentally different: it transfers capability from the training provider to your contact centre.
Instead of perpetual dependency on external consultants rebadging the same course, you’re building internal capacity.
Your team leaders become the development engine. The conversations become embedded in daily routines rather than expensive off-site events.
Companies with comprehensive training programmes see 218% higher income per employee. But “comprehensive” doesn’t mean more classroom hours.
It means embedded, reinforced, and sustained.
What The First 30 Days Actually Look Like
Start with discovery. Uncover the behaviours that are needed for great performance.
Most sites already have this data through quality monitoring, call analysis, and AI sentiment tracking. This gives you three to five focus areas, establishes the current baseline, and defines what you’re hoping to move forward.
Take team leaders for half a day. Help them understand conversational leadership and how the conversations they have on the day job, in their routines with teams, is where behaviour change happens.
Not training their teams. Just having the right conversations about the right stuff.
Launch them with a guided conversation template linked to one key behaviour you want to shift. Give them two weeks to have these chats.
Then meet for online group coaching to share stories of success and ideas for more. They implement the ideas they think will move the dial.
Two weeks later, another coaching session to hear what worked and the associated results.
Capture these stories and the tangible benefits. Share them.
The hardest part about behaviour and culture change is that it’s intangible. It cannot be measured. But it can be evidenced through story.
Why I Know This Works
I spent almost a decade running L&D across a 42-site contact centre estate.
I made these mistakes. I had a team running training. It was an endless cycle. We were busy but risked being busy fools.
Over time, studying human psychology, raising children, and working in other highly regulated, highly compliant, highly operational industries helped me see something fundamental.
Change happens in conversations. Repeated ones.
Not in one-off mandates, even if delivered creatively.
People need to own their change. They don’t get to do this if they don’t have time to have conversations about it and see how it fits into their own role every day.
If I could go back and speak to my earlier self, the one booking all those courses, I’d say this: it takes time, and the stuff after the classroom matters far more than what happens inside it.
Sites have got used to a certain way. Limited budget, limited understanding, limited search for answers.
If you don’t know what you don’t know, or think only one option is available, that’s what you choose.
The good news? There’s a better way. And it starts with a conversation. If you’re ready to move beyond training theatre and build genuine capability in your contact centre, email us here: ndassociates.co.uk/contact