Customer service is among the most frequently spouted buzzwords in business.

Whether they are addressing employees or investors, executives talk about the importance of responding to customers' needs with top-notch customer service. But it's often just talk, at least according to the many consumers who complain that they frequently waste hours on the phone trying to reach customer-service representatives who can help them.

The service reps have a different perspective. They handle dozens of calls every day from frustrated and often irate customers, each with a different problem. They are often judged by how quickly they complete a call or whether they sell a customer a new product, rather than how well they resolve a problem.

Executives who sincerely want to satisfy consumers should analyze how they rate service reps' performances -- and make sure they are actually rewarding good service. They should also train their employees well and then rely on them to exercise some of their own judgment when dealing with consumers.

That's what Sarah Grayson and Zia Khan, consultants at New York-based Katzenbach Partners, concluded after working with a team of about 30 customer-service representatives at a large telecommunications company. While observing the employees at work over several weeks, they noted that about 10% of the team didn't follow scripts but resolved many problems in one call, sometimes selling customers a new service as well. These customer reps were able to use their knowledge of the company's products and listening skills to find solutions.

Average performers "apologized a lot to customers about what they couldn't do, while the high performers always offered something," Ms. Grayson adds. When scheduling a repair person to make a house call, for instance, the high performers would say, "I can't get you anyone on Friday, but I'm making this appointment for Monday -- and meanwhile I'll put you on a waiting list for Friday, so give me a cellphone number where you can be reached if something opens up."

To improve the average performers' skills, the consultants broke the team into small groups and gave them two hours of training a week for eight weeks. They urged the reps to start sharing their problems and successes. And they brought in a customer to talk about his positive and negative experiences with the call center.

To encourage the customer reps to "step inside the shoes of customers," the consultants also presented a weekly award -- a pair of baby shoes -- to the employee who had most efficiently solved the most customer problems. Throughout the training, they also surveyed consumers and tracked the improvement in the number of first-call problem resolutions.

Atlanta-based EarthLink, the Internet-service provider, uses some of the same techniques. John Bowden, group vice president of customer support, says customer-service workers respond better to customer problems "when they're acknowledged by bosses" and given the right training. At EarthLink, he says, service reps have to be able to converse with a broad mix of customers -- from, say, "the head of information services at a big company, who likely has diagnosed some of his problem before he makes a call, to my 82-year-old father, who needs a rep to figure it all out."

EarthLink outsources most customer-service work to other companies in India, the U.S., the Philippines, Canada and other countries. But Mr. Bowden travels often to these sites to make sure the nearly 4,000 service representatives EarthLink uses are following the same procedures when speaking with customers and are being supervised and treated well. "You can tell the minute you walk into a call center if people are being treated well or if they're being bled," he says. "And," he adds, "I've never seen an unhappy agent do a good job with customers."

Mr. Bowden and his staff also track the customer-satisfaction ratings received by individual service representatives. "If you've got a group of 15 agents somewhere and seven have low ratings but eight are rated highly, the average won't tell you very much," he says. Those who can't seem to quickly resolve customer problems may lack enough knowledge about EarthLink's products, while others rated low on providing "customer satisfaction" may be communicating poorly. In either case, he says, "we give them extra training, and if that doesn't help [we] may decide it's a bad job fit for them."

Some customers still find themselves jumping through hoops to get service. Mike Dillon, an associate professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, says he spent hours phoning and emailing last summer trying to cancel his Internet service with PeoplePC, a unit of EarthLink.

He didn't get help, he says, until he sent an email to PeoplePC's chief executive and public-relations department, as well as to the Better Business Bureau in San Francisco, where PeoplePC is based.

"We're not perfect, and I offer my apologies," says Mr. Bowden. "What keeps me up at night is thinking of how we can always improve. It's complex because service involves dealing with a thousand moving parts."