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Coaching is a fundamental part of your job as a contact center manager. It’s your chance to reinforce your agents’ strengths, identify areas for improvement, and teach them the skills they need to develop their careers. In addition, regular coaching sessions provide an opportunity for you to recognize your team’s efforts and boost morale.
You may believe that your coaching playbook is championship-caliber. That you’re the Phil Jackson of the contact center, a shining beacon of inspiration who drops gems of wisdom with every breath. But do your agents see you the same way?
In our recent State of the Contact Center Report, we surveyed hundreds of agents to learn what they really thought about the coaching process. In this post, we’ll share our top findings, as well as some actionable tips you can use to take your agent coaching to the next level.
The first finding in our survey should be music to your ears — a good coaching program does, in fact, translate to better customer experiences. A whopping 86% of the contact center agents we surveyed said feedback on their call performance has a positive impact on the level of service they provide. On top of that, 65% doubled down and said coaching has a very positive impact on the service they provide. So, you can rest assured that all the hard work you put into coaching your team is paying off.
Our next survey finding was that it is possible to over-coach your agents. When you schedule coaching sessions too frequently, agents can feel like you’re breathing down their necks and micromanaging them. Contact center employees who have coaching sessions more than once a week are far more likely to quit in the next six months than those who get weekly coaching.
As our last finding revealed, when agents are coached more than once a week, they feel like they’re being micromanaged and are more likely to quit. According to the numbers, 26% of agents receive coaching more than once a week. If you’re in that cohort, you should consider moving to a weekly coaching model instead, as it will likely improve agent retention.
No coaching program is complete without the right technology to support it. In the AI era, you have more tools than ever at your disposal to automate routine tasks and boost efficiency. According to our survey, conversation intelligence is becoming an integral piece of contact center technology. When we asked agents what the fairest method of scoring phone calls was, the top response was “conversation intelligence with human review.” Today’s agents crave the unbiased approach of using AI to score their calls, and they believe it’s the fairest way to evaluate their performance.
The traditional model of coaching agents involves manually listening to your call recordings to identify each agent’s strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. However, this approach isn’t scalable, since most managers only have the bandwidth to listen to a small sample of their calls. This can lead to sampling bias, as you may catch some of your best agents on their worst days or vice versa. In addition, this manual process is prone to subjectivity and human error, and it may cause agents to feel they’re not being evaluated fairly.
Conversation intelligence solves this problem by automatically scoring all of your calls with an AI model trained for your business. You can set the criteria that make up a successful call — for example, you may require each agent to start the call with the approved greeting script, mention a recent promotion, and end with a proper close. Agents will then receive a score based on these criteria, helping them understand exactly what they need to work on.
Invoca also offers coaching tools to help you support agents, whether they’re in the office with you or working remotely. For instance, you can comment directly on call recordings and transcripts, and @mention agents to give them real-time feedback. This allows you to give feedback on a regular cadence between coaching sessions, helping agents develop their skills more quickly without it feeling like you’re micromanaging.
MoneySolver is a national financial services company based in Jacksonville, Florida that helps people and businesses transform their student loan, tax, business, and credit situations. The MoneySolver team uses Invoca to automatically score every call that comes into their contact center. As a result, they were able to coach their agents more effectively and double their close rate.
In addition, Invoca has improved agent morale at MoneySolver’s contact center. Because the scores are generated by an objective AI model, agents can rest assured that they’re being evaluated fairly. This takes the noise out of the process and motivates them to take ownership of their performance.
“Invoca has been a game-changer for us. Our agents can see exactly where they’re falling off the talk track and get instant feedback on how they can improve. It’s helped us to double our close rate at the contact center,” said Mark Roblez, director of call center operations at MoneySolver.
Read the full MoneySolver case study here
For our State of the Contact Center report, we surveyed 500 contact center agents and managers in the U.S. and U.K. on how they work, how satisfied they are with their jobs, and what they need to be successful. Download your copy here to learn what they had to say.
