Call Center Coaching

What is Call Center Coaching?

Call center coaching is an organized activity to improve the skill set of customer service and sales representatives. The skills can involve effective communication with customers, getting apprised with call center software, etc. 

Call center coaching can involve several processes such as one-to-one guidance sessions, group learning, peer-to-peer learning, role-playing, etc. All this should be followed in alignment with exhaustive feedback so that agents understand the company’s expectations and how they are faring against the KPIs.

Importance of Call Center Coaching

As per a popular saying- “Great call center agents are not born, they are made!”

And for that, you need a robust call center training program. Such coaching modules empower agents with the requisite technical tools and knowledge to assist customers in the best possible way.

Not only customers but call center coaching also leads to confident employees as agents can see growth in their skillset. This enhances their productivity and promotes an overall positive work environment.

Popular Coaching Models for Contact Centers

There are three popular contact center coaching models. We discuss them below- 

1. GROW Model

GROW stands for Goal, Reality, Options, Will. This model constitutes formulating questions around these four categories and evaluating your call center performance. GROW model is the best for face-to-face and side-by-side coaching. However, it is not preferred for call center online coaching.

2. THINK Model

The Think Model is a standard criterion considered before offering feedback to an agent. Feedback is a crucial aspect of call center coaching and can make or break your efforts. The Think model helps you formulate your feedback in such a way that it is positive and inspiring rather than negative. You can use this model in the following way- 

‘Ask Yourself, is your feedback True, Honest, Inspiring, Necessary and Kind?’ (THINK)

3. A WISH AND TWO STARS Model

This model takes a pragmatic approach to giving feedback to customer service reps. You award them two stars for every two tasks successfully achieved by the agent. At the same time, you ask them the particular aspect they wish to see improvement in.

What Is the Goal of a Call Center Coaching Manager?

A call center coaching manager understands that their employees are as important as customers to their business success. Hence they stay away from micro-managing their agents, instead focussing on aligning the organization's growth with the personal growth of agents. 

Call agents look up to center coaching managers, and their feedback guides agents' improvement journey. Hence the primary goal for the management should be to identify the ‘Why’ of their coaching style. 

Team leaders can inspire agents and enable them to reach the pinnacle of their skill set. They should thus set a goal to usher in a positive work environment to take each agent along.

Key Focus Areas for Effective Call Center Coaching by Managers

1. Thorough information of the product or service

The agents should know the product/service your client offers so they can tackle customer grievances confidently. Empower your agents by establishing a knowledge base that can be accessed on live calls.

2. Mannerisms

How your reps greet customers and talk to them throughout the call can become a hallmark of your brand. Often customers will form a lasting impression of your brand based on how agents behaved with them on the call. 

An agent’s tone and choice of words also hold a lot of power. If everything is top-notch, they can easily convert potential leads. But if the tone was off or inappropriate comments were used, even the most loyal customers would jump ship and go to your competitors.

3. Software understanding

You don’t want your agents wasting time figuring out the solutions while being live. Hence you should train them in handling the call center software. This significantly reduces the Average Hold Time (AHT) and increases the FCR for each customer and enhances agent’s productivity. 

How Do Managers Implement Instant Call Center Coaching Effectively?

As a call center manager, you have to remember that coaching is not an isolated concept.It is intrinsically linked to the work atmosphere. You must consider your agent’s well-being while helping them achieve professional achievements. This can be done in several easy steps-

1. Always give feedback in private. Agents might not like it if their shortcomings are discussed publicly. 
2. Don’t focus too much on the negative. Always build upon the positive aspects, even if you have to give critical feedback. 
3. Use modern technology such as AI-powered call recording platforms to obtain deep insights into agents’ performance. 
4. Try to arrange micro-coaching sessions that improve the agents' specific skill sets. Don’t try to crunch a lot of learning in a few sessions. 
5. Keep the mood light and fun in the coaching sessions. While learning is not to be compromised, it also shouldn’t become a drag. Fun sessions keep agents engaged for their entirety, thus bettering their learning outcomes. 

Challenges with Call Center Coaching

1. Lack of supervision

You might have put up agents for coaching, but it won’t bear much result if you are not monitoring their progress regularly and observing whether coaching is making any changes in their performance. 

2. No space for agents to record their feedback

Feedback is a two-way road, with both manager and agent feedback holding a significant place. However, agent feedback doesn’t get the same importance. You have to trust that your agents want to improve genuinely. They might offer valuable suggestions that can enhance the effectiveness of your training program. 

3. Ambiguous Coaching Models

There can be no end to improvement; every tiny thing about your call center might show promise of upgrading. Often coaching sessions become the ground for covering every possible skill in the sun. Without focussed sessions, agents might not grasp your expectations or even become disengaged. 

Why Traditional Call Center Coaching Falls Short for Modern Agents and Managers

Every experienced manager or agent( having spent six months or more) understands the importance of metrics such as average handling time (AHT), first-contact resolution (FCR), or customer satisfaction (CSAT). They’d also know that an upward trend in FCR and CSAT and a reducing trend in AHT is a good indicator, suggesting the effectiveness of the agent coaching program. 

Instead of chasing the metrics, contact center coaching has become a frustrating task for call center coaches and agents alike. And the turn of events can be attributed to a number of reasons:

1. Quality coaching needs time.
2. Coaches are unprepared and poorly perform in sessions. 
3. Classroom coaching isn’t a scalable option
4. Poor tracking of agents' performance
5. Vague feedback and insufficient evidence of poor performance.
6. Wrong mindset adopted for coaching agents.
7. Coaching is often poorly targeted.

Hence, the discussion boils down to a simple and modern conclusion: Creating smarter call center coaching techniques—will upskill contact center agents with personalized, targeted, and timely coaching that eliminates human dependency. 

And accepting the new way of coaching is the best opportunity for scaling organizations with a large call volume and growing contact center teams.

Call Center Coaching Solutions: The Pillars of Successful Sessions

The first pillar of a successful call center coaching solution is engagement. Coaching can go on for a longer period, and there is a risk of agents losing interest. You have to ensure that you help them maintain the same level of enthusiasm and engagement. 

Another fundamental pillar of successful call center coaching is simulation. This step is particularly essential for new joiners. You can make them comfortable with the various call center solutions you use through role-play or mock interactions. You can also give them an on-call experience handling all types of customers. 

How do you create a smarter call center coaching environment?

1. Automating repetitive tasks

Automating repetitive tasks leaves more time for agents for coaching sessions.

2. Make data work for you

Contact centers should use software that offers actionable insights into agents’ performance. They can then successfully judge an agent’s capability on multiple indicators.

3. Move beyond face-to-face coaching

Digitization of coaching modules can work wonders for your business. You’d have a number of tools at your disposal- on-demand coaching videos, call recordings of top performers, gamification, etc. Digital coaching is beneficial for coaching remote agents. 

What resources do you need for successful call center coaching?

Create a checklist diagram with the below points

1. Contact center automated agent coaching software
2. Appropriate coaching material
3. Experienced agents and managers
4. Evaluative tests and surveys
5. Portals for online training of agents
6. Insightful reports to analyze an agent’s performance.

How Automated Coaching by Convin Transforms Call Centers

How does Convin’s automated agent coaching improve CSAT by 27% and closure rate by 21%?

Convin’s automated agent coaching is built for contemporary contact centers. Our solution can streamline coaching and help agents deliver top-notch performance within 45 days.

Convin’s automated agent coaching is built for contemporary contact centers. Our solution can streamline coaching and help agents deliver top-notch performance within 45 days.

1. Automated agent performance and tracking

Ability to evaluate agent call performance with AI. Call auditing is conducted on 100% of agent calls instead of manual, random, and smaller samples.

As an option, managers can manually score agents even after receiving the AI call score.

2. Coaching is automated and removes human dependency

Managers are relieved of the responsibility of assigning coaching sessions and bringing training material to the table. Agents can automatically receive coaching recommendations.

3. Personalized and targeted coaching at scale

Agents receive only relatable coaching moments. Practically, agent performance issues are categorized under “skill” and “will” components. Agents can access will or skill coaching sessions based on the call scores.

The coaching recommendations are reflected in the emails and platform for agents’ convenience.

4. Use peer-to-peer coaching

Convin believes in replicating top-performance. As a best practice, the coaching sessions will be snippets auto-generated from top-performing agents' recorded calls. Newcomers can leverage the coaching program to ramp up faster.

5. Analytics and reporting

With the backing of AI, analytics and reporting are performed on all agent calls. The coaching progress is also reported and displayed to managers and agents. Access to a comparative team dashboard excites agents to perform better and outperform their peers.

What Are The Other Product Capabilities Of Convin?

Convin monitors and analyzes 100% of calls automatically based on custom parameters set by your organization. The conversation analysis offers winning behavior identification and last-mile automated agent coaching.

Automated Quality Management

Convin’s call center tool automatically reviews 100% of customer calls using custom call evaluation forms and spots agent performance challenges and unhappy customer conversations. Through automated quality management, managers and QA generate call scores that help establish coaching needs and staff dissatisfaction. 

Winning Pattern Identification

With the help of conversation insights and deal status, Convin presents parameters that drive positive and negative outcomes for the business. Spot violations, winning parameters,  customer sentiments, and threats to take proactive measures before customer calls.

Automated agent coaching

Convin’s system automatically generates coaching opportunities after reviewing agent performance. Based on the AI-driven call scores- good, average, and poor performers are identified, and the platform triggers personalized agent coaching based on the requirement. Coaching instances are extracted from the top performers' conversations and best practices. This method improves call handling quality and reduces supervisor escalations to a large extent.

Conversation intelligence

CI records, transcribes, and analyzes conversations to generate call insights and transcriptions. The conversation intelligence software discourages manual conversation review and all other non-sales activities by automating notes, action items, and CRM entries.

Access agent performance KPI and customer experience quality criteria to produce consumable role-based reports pinpointing key challenges and opportunities. These reports are not only available on the Convin platform but are periodically emailed to the managers.

Convin’s Call Monitoring system is entirely safe

At Convin, we understand the customer and call data security importance; that’s why we ensure your data is completely secure and safe with our in-house transcription and NLP engine. We ensure call data security in the following ways:

• In-house transcription and NLP
• Secure login and monitoring
• Hosted on AWS
• SSL data encryption
• Role-based access control
• Enterprise-grade application monitoring
• GDPR compliant meeting recording

And Convin, as of now, supports English, Hindi, and Hinglish. And it takes less than a week to get you onboarded, so don’t wait, schedule a demo right away!

FAQ

1. What is call center coaching?
‍Call center coaching is a structured process aimed at improving the skills, knowledge, and performance of customer service and sales agents. It involves personalized feedback, training sessions, and the use of models like GROW and THINK to enhance agents' communication, problem-solving, and technical abilities. The goal is to ensure agents can deliver exceptional customer experiences while meeting key performance indicators (KPIs).

2. Why is automated call center coaching important?
‍Automated call center coaching is important because it streamlines the coaching process, eliminates human biases, and ensures consistent, data-driven feedback. It allows managers to assess 100% of calls using AI, identify skill gaps, and provide personalized coaching at scale. This leads to improved agent performance, reduced attrition, enhanced customer satisfaction (CSAT), and significant time savings for supervisors and managers.

3. What are call center coaching tools?
‍Call center coaching tools are software solutions designed to assist managers in evaluating agent performance, providing feedback, and delivering training. These tools often include features like AI-driven call analysis, performance tracking dashboards, personalized coaching recommendations, and training modules. They help streamline the coaching process, improve efficiency, and ensure consistent skill development across teams.

4. What is call center coaching training?
‍Call center coaching training refers to a structured program aimed at equipping managers and team leaders with the skills, strategies, and resources needed to effectively coach call center agents. It covers topics like performance evaluation, feedback delivery, role-playing exercises, and the use of coaching models such as GROW and THINK. This training ensures managers can enhance agent performance and maintain high customer satisfaction levels.

5. What is a call center coaching template?
‍A call center coaching template is a standardized framework used by managers to structure coaching sessions. It includes predefined sections for recording agent performance metrics, feedback, goals, and action plans. Templates streamline the coaching process, ensure consistency, and make it easier for managers to track improvements over time. These templates can be customized to align with the organization's goals and KPIs.

6. What is a call center coaching plan template?
‍A call center coaching plan template is a detailed outline that helps managers create a systematic coaching approach for their agents. It typically includes:

• Performance goals and objectives.
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) to track progress.
• Specific areas for skill improvement.
• Feedback mechanisms.
• Actionable steps and timelines for achieving goals.
  The plan ensures coaching sessions are well-organized, targeted, and effective in driving performance improvements.