Effective agent coaching is the bedrock of a successful call center. Coaching helps agents navigate complex interactions with expertise and finesse when done right.
To be effective, contact center agents need more than just a set of guidelines and an appraisal of their performance. They expect their managers to devise personalized development paths, keep morale high, and help them grow professionally.
In this article you'll learn from contact center veteran's the best practices, challenges, future trends, and AI capabilities that can take your agent coaching strategies to the next level.
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.
Topics we're covering:
- Definition of Agent Coaching
- Why is Agent Coaching Important for Call Centers
- Challenges of Agent Coaching
- Agent Coaching Best Practices
- How AI Assists Agent Coaching
- Agent Coaching with AmplifAI
- Future Trends in Agent Coaching
- Best Tools to Scale Agent Coaching
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What Is Agent Coaching?
Agent coaching is a process where a call center agent receives feedback and training based on their performance and skill gaps.
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Ultimately, the main goal of agent 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.
Why is Agent Coaching Important for Call Centers?
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Here are the top agent coaching benefits for call centers:
1. Enhance agent performance
Agent coaching (the right way) increases productivity, improves communication, deepens product knowledge, and enhances problem-solving skills. Coaching allows call center agents to overcome their weaknesses and guides them to handle complex conversations without support.
Agent Performance 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.
Customer Experience 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.
Call Center Turnover Tip: Develop a buddy system where a newly joined call center agent gets assigned to a top-performing agent. The seasoned agent can 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.
Boosting Productivity Tip: Review call center analytics to guide your coaching strategies.
Challenges of Agent Coaching
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Agent coaching is not as simple as it sounds. It comes with its own set of challenges, which are listed below.
4 Most Common Agent Coaching Challenges
1. Lack of Time
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.
2. Data Aggregation and Analysis
Call center supervisors manually interpret data from various sources to create performance reports and document coaching sessions. Not only is this process prone to human error, it is extremely time-consuming. Organizations not equipped with the technology to ease these burdens bleed costly hours of inefficient manual work.
3. Lack of Training
Many coaches are first-time leaders or previously worked as solo contributors. Without the right coaching effectiveness assessments and training, coaches might miss important steps in the coaching process.
4. Inconsistent Coaching Models
Coaching with different styles can be fine, but using different coaching models will lead to inconsistent results. Coaching model variations confuse the process leading to coaching improvements that can't be properly quantified against the models used by other team leaders.
Agent Coaching Best Practices
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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.Personalize coaching
Personalized agent coaching is about customizing sessions to help agents be their personal 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 is time-consuming if done manually.
Leverage AI that assists contact center leaders with the insights, recommended actions, and tools they need to personalize and prioritize agent development. Tools like AmplifAI track progress, identify areas for improvement, take coaching session notes, and even have a coaching effectiveness score.
Impact of Personalized Agent Coaching
Company: Leading US Financial Services Company
A leading financial services company transformed their coaching approach using AmplifAI’s contact center performance management software. Previously, managers spent hours manually reviewing metrics and preparing for coaching sessions.
Results:
15 minutes saved per coaching session
Impact: Enabled 53,000 additional customer calls annually
14-second improvement in Average Handle Time
Impact: Increased CSAT scores
$380,000 annualized savings
Impact: Achieved across a team of 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.
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 Agent 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 insights and feedback collected from all types of communication is one of the most important inputs for supporting the agent coaching process.
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 is an effective agent coaching technique. The practice of call-handling with peers or mentors in a safe learning environment helps agents practice new skills before doing it with customers.
6. Set up SMART goals
S.M.A.R.T. 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.
SMART Goal Example: Call center agents receive coaching tips on performance metrics such as CSAT. However, CSAT is a top-line metric representing multiple contact types and behaviors. It's important to be more specific and measurable with the types of behaviors and the sub-KPI's that are involved in improving CSAT.
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 need training to deliver consistent agent coaching. 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.
How Does AI Assist with Agent Coaching?
Coaching is one of the most impactful ways to improve agent performance, but it’s also one of the hardest to do consistently.
Team leaders are overloaded with data, short on time, and constantly asking:
When should I coach? Who needs it most? What should I focus on?
AI solves for scale. Thoughtfully implemented AI helps identify coaching opportunities faster, prioritize actions based on performance patterns, and track what’s working, so leaders can focus on conversations, not spreadsheets.
1. Data Aggregation
AI excels at data aggregation and analysis. Leveraging AI to remove the data aggregation and analysis function, contact center leaders can save huge amounts of time and put that focus back into coaching agents.
AI in Agent Coaching Tip: Not every AI coaching solution does this. Carefully research and seek out software that augments, not replaces, the human aspects of coaching.
2. 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 can uncover agents’ unique strengths and weaknesses and provide managers with tailored coaching recommendations for each agent.
3. Automated Follow-Up
Having trouble keeping up with follow-up, feedback, or recognition? The right AI coaching solution can automate these processes seamlessly.
AI in Agent Coaching Consideration
AI in coaching needs to be implemented thoughtfully.
Expecting AI to replace a human coach and yield the same results will backfire.
Learn about the pitfalls of AI coaching and see how to grade AI coaching software that truly augments (not replaces) human capabilities.
Agent Coaching with AmplifAI
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The best CX leaders aren’t just tracking performance, they’re building high-performing teams. That starts with coaching systems that scale.
AmplifAI helps contact centers operationalize coaching across teams by unifying all performance data, surfacing coaching opportunities, and guiding managers with role-based insights and measurable next steps.
Here’s how AmplifAI turns agent coaching from a time drain into a performance driver:
1. Full data unification and integration
AI is only as good as the data it has to work with. AmplifAI pulls in data from every source: QA, CRM, CSAT, transcripts, so managers no longer have to gather and prep performance data manually.
2. Coaching clarity through performance intelligence
Role-based performance dashboards show contact center leaders exactly where to focus. AmplifAI builds high-performer persona benchmarks and helps identify what top agents do differently, so coaching has direction.
3. AI-recommended coaching actions
Take the guesswork out of coaching prep. AmplifAI analyzes agent performance patterns to identify the highest-impact coaching opportunities and provides targeted next best action recommendations to team leaders.
4. Coaching Effectiveness Measurement
Measure what’s working. AmplifAI measures agent improvement after each session, and uses this data to grade the effectiveness of coaching, helping supervisors refine their techniques and replicate what works best.
5. Gamification and Recognition Recognition and gamification built in
Neve miss a praiseworthy moment. When agents hit coaching goals, AmplifAI triggers personalized recognition and gamified rewards, keeping motivation high and progress visible.
6. Tie QA directly to coaching
With auto-QA, AmplifAI transforms evaluation insights into coaching actions automatically, closing the loop between what’s measured and what gets improved.
Explore our top-rated call center coaching software review to see how AmplifAI compares.
Future Trends in Agent Coaching
Agent coaching has been evolving from one-off feedback sessions into data-driven, personalized development strategies that transform contact center performance.
The goal in 2025 isn’t running to replace coaches with AI (AI makes a poor coach), it’s to give team leaders more time to coach by automating what slows them down: data analysis, prep, and tracking.
The focus is shifting to meaningful conversations, delivered consistently and at scale.
As highlighted in Gartner's 2024 Cool Vendor Report, contact centers are shifting away from fragmented coaching approaches to AI-enabled systems that provide targeted actions alongside performance analysis.
In 2025, contact centers need agent coaching solutions that:
- Unify performance data from every source
- Surface the highest-impact coaching opportunities
- Trigger real-time, role-specific coaching actions
- Measure outcomes and track coaching effectiveness
AmplifAI, trusted by 150+ brands and top BPOs, is the only platform that turns coaching from a time sink into a performance strategy, helping organizations shift from effort to impact.
Boost your bottom line by building up your frontline in 2025.
Book a demo to see how AmplifAI enables better coaching through smarter systems.
Best Tools to Scale Agent Coaching
If you're building stronger agent coaching systems, these expert-reviewed guides will help you find the right technology to unify data, trigger timely feedback, and drive frontline performance.
👉 Explore the 9 Best Call Center Coaching Software Platforms of 2025
See how the top agent coaching tools support real-time, personalized development at scale.
👉 Explore the 11 Best Call Center Quality Assurance Platforms of 2025
Discover QA solutions that connect insights directly to coaching actions.
👉 Explore the 7 Best Call Center Gamification Software Tools of 2025
Reinforce coaching wins through recognition, motivation, and skill-based challenges.
👉 Explore the 12 Best Call Center Performance Management Systems of 2025
Unify coaching, QA, recognition, and KPIs in one continuous feedback loop.
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