Frontline CX training

Your frontline hears what's broken first.Teach them what to do with it.

Start With Yes is a one-day, scenario-based program for frontline teams. Your people learn one repeatable way to handle every enquiry, complaint and distressed customer, with no scripts. The payoff: fewer escalations, fewer repeat contacts, and a clear view of what your system needs to fix.

Time to fix the system: book a call

The problem

Scripts break the moment a real person turns up.And someone pays for it.

A script works until the customer goes off it. Then your team has two choices: freeze or escalate. Either way, the customer calls back, the complaint lands on a leader's desk, and the real problem in your system never gets reported.

What it's costing you now:

Leaders pulled into problems the frontline could have solved.
Customers telling their story three times before anyone believes them. We call this the Advocacy Burden.
Staff who go home drained and start looking for the exit.
Complaints closed without anyone learning why they happened.

Who it's for

Frontline teams working with internal and external customers across all sectors
Teams who handle complaints, distress or difficult news
Leaders who want their team to feel confident and supported

What your team learns

Four capabilities.One framework for every interaction.

Clarity: are you responding or reacting?

You're on the front desk, the phone rings and the person on the other end is already angry. Your heart rate goes up. You want to fix it fast, defend yourself or just get off the call. That's reacting, and it happens to everyone. Clarity helps your people catch that moment, take a breath and choose how to respond instead.

The result: calmer conversations, and fewer that spiral into complaints.

Trust: always right, or always respected?

The customer is always ~~right~~ respected.

Your team can't always say yes. Legislation, policy and cost set real limits. Trust is built in how those limits are held. Integrity: every customer is treated the same. Competency: your people can explain the why. Care: the customer can tell someone is on their side, even when the answer is no.

The result: a "no" that doesn't turn into a complaint.

Context: are you sending an ambulance for a splinter?

Most customers need help: a clear answer and a next step. A few need rescue. When your team can't tell the difference, everything gets escalated, leaders drown in small problems, and the customers who truly need rescue wait in the queue. Context teaches your people to triage. Helping supports. Rescuing absorbs.

The result: fewer escalations, and leader time back.

Humanity: does the customer feel heard?

Listen, Validate, Help. Listen for what the customer is feeling underneath what they say. Validate by believing them, with zero judgement. Then help them through the process. People who feel heard stop fighting the process and start working with it.

The result: more issues resolved at first contact, fewer repeat calls.

What changes

What everyone gets back.

Your customers

They get a person, not a script. Someone who listens before they answer.
They feel heard and believed the first time, so they don't have to call back.
Their problem gets sorted at the front line, not passed up the chain.
Even when the answer is no, they walk away feeling respected.

Your frontline people

They know what to say when someone is angry, without a script.
They handle emotion with confidence instead of dreading the next call.
They go home with energy left, because hard conversations stop following them.

Your organisation

Fewer escalations reaching your leaders.
Fewer repeat contacts and callbacks.
Real insight into what's broken in your system, straight from the people who hear it first.

How it works

Three steps.

01
We learn your world.
A short conversation about your team, your customers and the conversations that are hardest right now. We build the day around them.
02
The day.
A high-energy day in the room with Karen or Becky, tailored to your industry and your team. It suits every profession and works for one team or your whole organisation. Watch the walls come down as everyone leaves with the same repeatable framework.
03
Back to work.
Every person leaves with the framework and a personal promise to use it on their next shift.

Brutalist concrete facade with a person passing

After the day

Keep the learning going.An optional add-on, if you want it.

Some teams are happy to take the framework and run with it. Others want a hand keeping it alive in the months that follow. If that's you, talk to us about a tailored embedding plan for your team, shaped around your people, your customers and the way you work.

Results

"Karen has an amazing ability to make everyone in the room feel safe, welcome and ready to engage."Director, leadership consultancy

Karen's local government customer experience strategy became the baseline other councils built on.

Your facilitator

Karen Cocks or Becky HirstLearn from people who've sat in your chair.

Karen led customer experience and IT in local government and spent 13 years in senior leadership in financial services. She knows the regulatory "no", the resident telling their story for the third time, and the staff member caught in the middle.

Master of Business Leadership · CCXP · Creator of the Start With Yes framework · Author of Start With Yes (in progress)

Becky has spent decades bringing complex stakeholder groups together to shape strategy and policy. She specialises in making it safe for people to say what's really going on, especially when views differ and emotions run high.

Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts · Co-instigator of Global Community Engagement Day · SACE Board of South Australia · Author of For the Love of Community Engagement

We agree who will work with your team when we book.

Questions

Can we run it for more than 25 people?

Yes. Larger groups run as more than one session. Talk to us about your numbers.

Is it tailored to us?

Yes. Every session is built on your team's real scenarios.

How will we know it worked?

With a tailored embedding plan, we agree up front what you want to see change, such as escalations, repeat contacts or complaint volumes, then check back to measure it.

Where does it run?

At your workplace, in person.

Investment

We don't teach people to fit the system.We fix the system.

FROM

$7,500

for up to 25 people