Call Center Coaching: Turn Agent Potential into Performance

Imagine an aspiring baseball player who is trying to perfect his swing. He spends hours in training sessions. He watches videos of how the top hitters swing the bat and he tries to imitate them. Still, his performance stats aren’t where they should be. But when a knowledgeable coach works with him; watches him swing the bat; explains what he’s doing wrong; and shows him specific techniques he can use to correct it, he is able to make great strides in improving his swing and his performance. It’s the personal focus and one-on-one guidance that makes all the difference.

Coaching call center employees is no different. While agents receive customer service training, especially at onboarding, these tend to be group sessions designed to acquire or refresh skills, address call center performance goals, and update agents on relevant policies or promotions. Once the training sessions are over, you need to coach agents individually to help them master the procedures and techniques that they learned.

Sometimes, businesses shy away from 1:1 coaching because it’s time-consuming and can be emotionally challenging. Having to tell an employee that his performance is lacking is never a pleasant task. But experience shows that 1:1 coaching is one of the surest ways to help call center agents understand their strong and weak points, and to help them improve their performance and realize their professional potential.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the most effective techniques for call center coaching.

Employ Effective Call Center Coaching Techniques

When supported by state-of the-art call center software, the following coaching techniques can help you propel your agents toward success.

1. Start with a sandwich

Most people react defensively to criticism – even if it’s constructive. The best way to ensure that agents will be open to your suggestions for improving their performance, is to sandwich the negative feedback between two instances of positive feedback. Use the agent’s own performance data to start the coaching session with a strength – something that they consistently do well. This sets a positive tone. Then introduce the negative feedback and show them how this too can be improved, just like another KPI that they recently improved. Starting and ending on a positive note contributes to the agent’s readiness to learn.

2. Use Hard Data and Real Examples

Employees value clarity, and the knowledge that they are being treated fairly. Concrete data lets agents quantify a shortcoming and understand whether this is a big issue or a small issue. It is far more helpful to see real metrics showing a 30% decrease in an agent’s customer satisfaction score, than to simply say, “your customer satisfaction scores have been slipping lately.”

When discussing negative feedback, provide specific examples from the agent’s own call recordings. During a call playback, the coach can point out where the interaction went wrong and how it could have been handled better, perhaps by using a specific technique. You can also playback similar interactions from different agents who have mastered this technique and use it with great success. The more objective and concrete your feedback, the easier it will be for agents to understand what they need to do to improve.

3. Role Play

Practice makes perfect. Role playing is a great way for agents to practice the skills and behaviors they need to adopt to improve their customer interactions. Use the agent’s own recorded calls to find an interaction that should have been handled better. Let the agent play the role of the customer in that interaction, while the coach plays the agent. In the “agent role” the coach can demonstrate behavioral skills such as active listening, empathy, and tone; or how to use of positive language to negotiate tricky customer encounters and lead them to a satisfactory resolution. Then switch roles and let the agent practice the skills he just learned. In this way, agents get to “experience” a successful call and get immediate feedback on their performance.

4. Listen

Often, agents are just as aware of their shortcomings as their managers are. One of the best uses of coaching session is to ask the agent to do a self-assessment. Once agents know that the coach is there to listen, they can explore their difficulties and successes more openly. Their own KPI and customer feedback metrics may have already given them ideas about areas that need improvement. Chronic shortcomings may be due to barriers that the agent experiences but the manager is not aware of. Once you’ve heard their side of the story, you can better guide agents to decisions and plans of action that they willingly adopt, and you only need to reinforce.

5. Collaborate on goals

One of the outcomes of any call center coaching session should be a plan of action with a clear understanding of what the agent is expected to achieve. Setting improvement goals should be a collaborative effort rather than edicts handed down from on high. When you collaborate to define actionable and doable goals, it shows agents that you are confident in their ability to correct performance issues.

6. Catch them doing it right!

The best time to measure an agent’s progress is right after a call center coaching session, when lessons learned are fresh and motivation to implement them is high. Within the same hour or at least the same day, live monitor a call and score the agent on those areas that needed improvement. This live feedback reinforces the right behaviors and lets you correct lingering issues on the spot.

Many of the call center coaching techniques we’ve outlined here depend on the ability to: 

• monitor and analyze real-time agent-customer conversations,
• review the agent’s recorded calls and quickly isolate pertinent examples
• show agent performance metrics on demand for any time period
• show how the agent stacks up against his co-workers,
• enable instant feedback loops between agent and manager.

These are just a few of the integrated capabilities that are needed for an effective call center coaching program.

Include Call Center Coaching in your WFO Strategy

Your contact center is only as good as the people staffing it. Call center coaching is one of the best ways to assure that agents know the value they bring to the contact center as well as their roles, responsibilities and goals.

NICE Performance Management solutions give contact centers the tools to continuously improve every aspect of agent performance and to enhance customer satisfaction. You get exactly what you need thanks to a modern, integrated, and easy-to-use suite of products that offers a unified system for performance management, workforce management, speech analytics, call recording, and more.

The NICE Performance Management solutions Coaching and Training module offers an effective way for agents to understand their strengths and weaknesses, engage a variety of content for rapid, retained learning, and track their improvement.

The module includes:

• Customized curricula and training materials based on performance role or group
• A variety of training material content and formats (videos, recordings, documents, slide shows, etc.)
• Ability to categorize and organize content library for intuitive navigation and learning
• Tracking and reporting capabilities to simplify feedback loops and fast-track agent development

Opportunities to achieve outstanding customer service should never be left to chance, or hampered by multi-vendor solutions. For the best call center coaching, choose the solution that lets you do it right - NICE NPM.