Agent coaching is the bedrock of a successful call center. Coaching helps agents navigate complex interactions with expertise and finesse when done right.
Today, agents need more than just a set of guidelines and an appraisal of their performance. They expect their managers to devise personalized development paths to keep morale high and help them grow professionally. A trickle-down effect from growing customer expectations.
This article explores the essentials of modern call center coaching, challenges, and how AI capabilities help build a high-performing customer service team.
This post features learnings from Lisa Strate, who has been in the contact center industry for over 20 years. Lisa has worked with top companies such as Purple, Verizon, eBay, and Netflix. As a people-centric leader, Lisa is passionate about mentoring and coaching agents and managers to help them excel and advance their careers.
The article includes:
- What Is Call Center Agent Coaching?
- Why is Agent Coaching Important for Call Centers
- Challenges of Agent Coaching
- Best Practices to Improve Agent Coaching in a Call Center
- How does AI transform Agent Coaching?
- Transform Your Agent Coaching Strategy with AmplifAI
What Is Call Center Agent Coaching?
Agent coaching is a process where a call center agent receives feedback and training based on their performance and skill gaps.
Ultimately, the main goal of coaching is to improve customer experience by making agents more fit to help customers. Coaching can include anything from specific product training to soft skills like listening and showing empathy.
The best call center managers rely on data to identify when and what to coach.
Why is Agent Coaching Important for Call Centers?
Here are the top agent coaching benefits for call centers:
1. Enhance agent performance
The right agent coaching strategy will increase productivity, improve communication, deepen product knowledge, and enhance problem-solving skills. Coaching allows call center agents to overcome their weaknesses and guides them to handle complex conversations without support.
Coaching tip: Coaching is not one-size-fits-all. Each agent requires personalized coaching based on their skill set and learning style. Pre-recorded videos should not be the only source of coach agents. Tap into other sources, such as role-playing scenarios, to overcome performance gaps.
2. Elevate customer experience
Agent coaching prepares your frontline to meet customer needs proactively and resolve customer queries quickly. This creates satisfied customers who are more likely to recommend products and services, boosting customer retention and positive word-of-mouth.
Coaching tip: While coaching your contact center agents, ensure that mentoring covers emotional intelligence (EQ). Being empathic towards customers creates a more positive experience.
3. Reduce call center turnover
When contact centers take agent coaching seriously, it promotes professional development, increases job satisfaction, and reduces call center turnover. If you can help retain top performers and boost employee morale, this will reduce one of the most expensive parts of operating a call center. The more you retain, the less you have to retrain.
Coaching tip: Develop a buddy system where a newly joined call center agent gets assigned to a top-performing agent. The seasoned agent shares their working style and discusses how they manage everything around the office. The buddy system helps new agents ramp up faster while the seasoned agent benefits from gaining supervisor experience.
4. Boost call center productivity
Improved call center productivity is one of the main benefits of successful coaching. Agent coaching directly impacts the call center’s key performance indicators (KPIs), such as First Call Resolution Rate. It’s up to you to decide what you want to achieve in the call center. The more focused you are on a specific measurable goal, the more likely you’ll see progress.
Coaching tip: Review call center analytics to guide your coaching strategies.
5. Streamline operations
Streamlined operations are a byproduct of an efficient call center. Connecting siloed software applications to a single performance enablement platform is one of the best ways to improve operational efficiency. More organized data means more informed coaching decisions can be made.
Coaching tip: Leverage AI-driven technology to automate coaching session scheduling and track improvement over time.
Challenges of Agent Coaching
Agent coaching is not as simple as it sounds. It comes with its own set of challenges, which are listed below.
The 4 Most Common Agent Coaching Challenges
1. Lack of time for coaching tasks
The average call center manager spends 30 hours a week between pre and post-coaching activities. Assuming they have nothing else on their plate (yeah, right?), that leaves them only 10 hours a week to spend coaching a team of 10-15 direct reports.
Every hour an agent receives coaching translates to one hour less time responding to customers. Given everyone’s busy schedules, one-on-one coaching sessions can often take a back seat.
2. Not using the right technology
Not leveraging the right technology creates a barrier to effective coaching in contact centers. Call center supervisors often manually interpret data from various sources to create performance reports and document coaching sessions. Not only is this process prone to human errors, it is extremely time-consuming. Organizations not equipped with the appropriate technology tend to bleed costly hours of inefficient manual work.
In addition, a lack of the right coaching technology makes tracking long-term progress challenging and risks missing valuable insights. This is even more difficult in remote or hybrid work environments, where face-to-face interaction is limited.
3. Focusing only on negative feedback
Call center coaching sessions tend to highlight only the negative aspects of an agent during the feedback session. With limited time, managers might only have time to point out what an agent is lacking as opposed to recognizing their strengths.
However, this approach often demotivates call center agents during the coaching process to focus only on corrective feedback rather than areas where an agent is performing well.
Giving constructive criticism is part of the coaching process, but acknowledging and recognizing positive growth is equally important.
4. Inconsistent coaching model
Every manager is different which can translate to having different coaching styles. Coaching with different styles can be fine, but deploying different coaching models will lead to inconsistent results.
Variations are just one part of the problem. Many coaches are first-time leaders or previously worked as solo contributors. Without the right leadership training, many coaches skip very important steps of proper performance improvement.
A lack of structure and process is the downfall when it comes to scaling what works.
Best Practices to Improve Agent Coaching in a Call Center
Here is the list of best practices to follow when formulating your agent coaching processes:
1. Build trust between managers and agents
Call center leadership must build trust with their employees. According to Lisa Strate, building trust will make the call center agents feel valued and create an inclusive environment.
The mantra for a successful coaching strategy isn't a one-way street of giving instructions; it is a collaborative process in which agents should be actively involved in their growth journey.
Trust is the foundational element of success. Once trust is achieved, all of these other tips will be much more effective.
2. Offer personalized coaching
Personalized agent coaching is about customizing sessions to help agents be their best. The more you personalize training based on an agent’s strengths, weaknesses, and personal motivations, the more productive your sessions will become.
As mentioned earlier, this all comes down to data analysis, which can be time-consuming if done manually.
Leveraging a coaching platform that focuses on agent development and personalized coaching is important to make the process feasible and successful. Tools like AmplifAI track progress, identify areas for improvement, take coaching session notes, and even have a coaching effectiveness score.
Real Example and Impact of Personalized Coaching
A leading US financial services company transformed its coaching processes through AmplifAI's performance enablement platform.
Initially, call center managers spent hours manually reviewing metrics and preparing for sessions. After leveraging AmplifAI, they received data-driven coaching recommendations for each agent, eliminating guesswork from the coaching process.
Here are a few highlights of what they achieved:
- Saved 15 minutes per coaching session, resulting in an increased capacity to handle 53,000 more calls a year
- Agents improved AHT by 14 seconds and increased CSAT
- $380,000 in annualized savings across 300 agents
3. Use a “sandwich” feedback approach
An ideal coaching approach involves sharing both positive and constructive feedback. When coaching call center agents, the focus should not just be on skill gaps and poor performance examples.
Here’s how it works: Start by sharing one positive feedback example. Follow with sharing an instance where there is room for improvement. Finally, end with one other piece of positive feedback.
The sandwich method makes constructive feedback easier to digest and a more pleasant experience overall.
Advanced Coaching Technique: Avoid the "But Sandwich"
A well-intentioned sandwich can sometimes be perceived as a “But Sandwich” – because junior coaches will say something like "great job on x, but you need to work on y." A quick transition can sometimes negate the desired effect of the compliment.
How the best managers do it: Instead dedicate time on praise and recognition, transition, then dedicate time on constructive and/or growth conversations.
4. Use customer feedback for agent coaching
Customer feedback collected from all types of communication is one of the most important inputs for driving performance improvement. agents as it helps improve performance directly from the perspective of a customer.
Discussing customer surveys during one-on-ones helps managers understand where the agent is performing well and where they could benefit from further guidance.
Listen to why Lisa Strate says customer feedback is as good as gold in the 3.5-minute video below.
5. Implement role-playing
Role-playing complex situations with agents is an effective coaching technique because it is as close as you can get to the real thing. Practicing call-handling techniques with peers or mentors in a safe learning environment helps agents practice new skills before doing it with customers.
This technique helps the agents identify their shortcomings and practice responses during the session to handle live conversations better.
6. Set up SMART goals for your CX teams
After determining all the development areas and goals for their teams, call center managers should set up SMART goals after each coaching session.
SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Teams that include these 5 dimensions in their goal-setting are more likely to reach their goals than teams who set goals without all of these dimensions.
SMART goals help meet knowledge gaps and resolve customer concerns. It has specific, measurable goals with a stipulated time to achieve those targets.
Let’s try to understand this with an example: call center agents receive coaching tips on performance metrics such as CSAT. However, CSAT is a topline metric representing multiple contact types and behaviors.
Real Example and Impact of Setting up SMART Goals
Chewy, like most companies, wanted to improve their CSAT score. While researching how to improve CSAT, they discovered that they were only personalizing their responses 43% of the time. By gearing agents toward specific, easy-to-practice behaviors, managers coached their team to double their personalization rate. As a result, Chewy saw a 10% increase in CSAT.
7. Coach the coaches
Coaches must be trained to deliver consistent quality sessions. A "coach the coach" program helps maintain high coaching standards across all contact center teams while providing opportunities for coaches to learn from each other.
The focus of these programs should include what coaching methodologies to follow, effective communication techniques, and performance management strategies. Ultimately, holding regular sessions among coaches will help bolster consistency in approaches and evaluation standards.
How does AI transform Agent Coaching?
Traditional agent coaching methods were great but had challenges, such as lack of time, inconsistent coaching methods, and difficulty tracking progress.
3 ways AI coaching transforms agent coaching
1. Data aggregation
The best AI products will centralize and analyze data from multiple sources by aggregating call recordings, chat logs, CRM data, and performance metrics into a single dashboard, helping managers identify coaching opportunities, performance trends, and areas for improvement. AI that aggregates all your data will result in more accurate insights.
Note: Not every AI solution does this. Be sure to look out for solutions that integrate with your existing tech stack.
2. Personalized coaching recommendations
The data analysis required for personalized coaching normally takes people 30-40% of their week if not more. AI can automate that entire process.
AI will uncover agents’ unique strengths and weaknesses, and provide managers with tailored coaching recommendations. It’s still personalized one-on-one coaching, just without the heavy lifting.
3. Coaching effectiveness tracking
If you can’t track it, you can’t improve it. AI helps call center managers measure the effectiveness of their coaching efforts by tracking their own coaching performance metrics.
Giving your boss honest feedback can be unsettling and is one of the reasons why it doesn’t happen as often. With AI, managers unlock access to real performance feedback and then get training on how they can improve their coaching approach.
Transform Your Agent Coaching Strategy with AmplifAI
Today, the best CX leaders are focusing on transforming their teams from average to all-star. By leveraging powerful call center coaching software, like AmplifAI, brands achieve scalable data-backed personalized coaching to make their CX fly.
AmplifAI’s Performance Enablement Platform Offerings:
Performance Intelligence
- Unified performance data: View pre-assembled performance data from all sources in one place.
- Role-based views: Get personalized real-time intelligence specific to each role.
- High-performer personas: Understand in depth how high-performing persons perform to establish a benchmark of excellence.
AI-powered coaching
- AI-driven coaching actions: Identify and recommend each agent's most impactful coaching opportunity.
- Coaching effectiveness scores: Measure the impact of a team leader's coaching on agent performance.
- Coaching notes and history: Generate AI coaching summaries using recorded audio and store them for historical coaching.
- Custom coaching forms: Create a standard template that aligns specific KPIs, behaviors, and notes with every interaction.
- SMART coaching goals: Factor in historical trends and peer performance to every coaching commitment.
When you choose a coaching tool, ensure that you have unified data with access to coaching modules planned for all roles and consider how top personas perform. This makes all your coaching actions much easier to put into motion.
Even if you're not sure you're ready to amplify your coaching processes, it helps to understand what is out there. Book your demo with AmplifAI to learn more about how coaching in the contact center can be so much better.
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