7 Tips for Successful Call Center Agent Coaching

Call center coaching is no easy task.

That’s because it can be a time-consuming and emotionally draining process for supervisors and coaches.

Yet, it is one of the most important call center best practices to continuously coach your agents.

You have to be on point when you coach the agents. It’s a sure shot way to improve not just their efficiency but also improve your customer satisfaction.

Understand what agents want and how can you improve their shortcomings with your coaching sessions.

Coaching sessions can be in groups or for an individual and are designed to acquire or refresh skills, address call center performance goals, inform about new policies and promotions, etc.

Let’s take a look at effective tips for call center coaching.

A. What is call center coaching?

The process of call center coaching aims to enhance the efficiency and productivity of call center representatives. In one-on-one meetings, coaches or supervisors provide each agent with specific advice and feedback tailored to their needs. Enhancing problem-solving, product knowledge, communication, and customer service methods is the primary objective.

Coaches can assist agents in overcoming obstacles and utilizing their strengths by identifying specific areas for improvement and developing custom action plans.

B. 7 Call center coaching tips

1. Coach your service team strategically

Do not focus only on low performers. Every agent needs guidance even if he/she is sitting at the top.

Make sure your time is being utilized, effectively. 

You can start with providing coaching to all groups (including top performers) and coaching techniques for call center agents
while keeping an on those employees who have the talent to reach at the top.

2. Micro-coach them throughout the day

Micro-coaching, or coaching in short bursts, can be very effective.

In this, managers have a personal interaction with the agents to discuss about the specific, real-time performance data, making the session useful and to the point.

Micro-coaching is the tool by which you can help agents who are struggling to perform and pin-point their weak areas without letting anyone else know about it, besides you and the agent.

3. Have a specific purpose

Whenever you have coaching sessions, it is your duty that agents get the maximum out of those sessions.

But it cannot be achieved if you are jam-packing those sessions with a lot of information. 

Stick to a single topic and discuss only that. For example, you can pick a specific call center metric and focus on how the agent can improve it. 

When you do that agents won’t get confused between different topics and will be able to understand better.

4. Start off on the right foot

When you coach agents, it should be to motivate them and not make them feel less.

So avoid passing judgment or calling out inadequacies and failures every time you meet them for coaching sessions. 

Instead, start your coaching sessions with the positives. Ask open-ended questions and talk about the behavior (not the person).

The purpose of coaching is to encourage agents and help them achieve their personal best. 

5. Teachable skills 

Most of the call center skills are teachable and agents can improve their skills if they want to.

For any agent, timely and specific feedback is the most important because it can help them a lot in improving their skills.

While providing feedback, focus more on behavior of the agents that can impact the customer experience (i.e., active listening, empathy, tone). 

If supervisors use specific examples of the opportunity, how the agent can handle the situation differently, and break it down to the behavioral level rather than talking about the high-level guideline category, agents will be more receptive to feedback and ultimately provide the desired results.

6. Creating an action plan

When coaching behaviors become a priority over numbers and metrics, supervisors must focus on communicating their objectives clearly to agents and measuring success based on the improvement of call center behaviors. 

Because measuring behavior isn’t always as concrete as measuring numbers, discussing desired outcomes and setting up a time to make sure they are achieved is crucial to growth.

Encouraging them to use proper empathy statements in customer service, motivating agents with positivity, and meeting regularly about desired behavioral outcomes keeps agents on track and inspired to grow.

7. Role Plays in call center coaching

Practice makes perfect.

Role play is a great way to learn the new skills that they require for customer interactions.

You can use agent’s own calls to tell them about the mistakes that he committed during the conversation and use role-play to tell them how could he handle that situation better.

C. Using Enthu.AI for 10X faster call center agent coaching

Contact center agent coaching as a process has to be continuous and entrenched in your organization DNA.

Unfortunately, why many call centers never focus on coaching because of the execution hardships associated with it.

For call center coaching software to be meaningful, managers/supervisors/quality analysts need to manually listen to conversations, generate coaching opportunities, share insights with agents, continuously monitor performance and retune their coaching agents in call center strategy to adapt to the agent needs.

If done manually, this needs a lot of effort.

Thankfully, Enthu.AI’s agent training coaching capabilities and conversation intelligence solution can help you automate 90% of this work. Essentially, Enthu.AI helps you do the following:-

In short, Enthu.AI becomes your central source of agent performance and coaching solution for better agent performance.

Conclusion

Coaching call center agents is critically important.

Maintaining quality assurance best practices is the first step to surface out agent opportunities.

As you work on these opportunities and coach your agents, you will eventually witness better AHTs, improved FCR and reduced customer churn.

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