If your call times are creeping upward in duration, your first-call resolution rates are declining, and your customer satisfaction scores are dropping, you may need to start coaching your call center agents.
Of course, implementing a formal coaching program can promote skill development and improve key performance metrics across your call center, but building a coaching program is easier said than done.
To build an impactful call center coaching program, your managers will need to assess your team’s abilities, establish coaching frameworks tailored to skill gaps for individual employees, and continually track the efficacy of your coaching program to ensure it’s yielding appropriate results.
If you’re struggling to maintain quality support in your call center, it might be time to start coaching your call center agents. That said, there are many signs that’ll help you know for sure.
Red Flags that Signal Call Center Coaching Is a Good Idea
The warning signs and red flags that signal a call center is falling behind in effectively supporting customers are usually pretty easy to spot—as long as you’re paying attention.
To determine if your call center needs a coaching investment, watch and see if any of these key performance indicators are trending in the wrong direction:
- Declining first-call resolution rates: If your FCR rates are consistently falling below 80%, you should definitely consider retraining your staff or incorporating a coaching program for your call center.
- Increasing average handle times: Ideally, your support call handle times should not be above eight minutes per call. This can vary from business to business, however.
- Your support calls are being escalated more frequently: Most of your support calls should be resolved on the first call—unless it’s an outlier case. If your calls are constantly being escalated, this is a clear sign that your call center reps aren’t currently equipped to manage customer support effectively.
- There’s a spike in negative verbal feedback or online reviews: This is one of the most visible indicators that your call center needs coaching. If your support team is being slammed with negative feedback on a regular basis, you should coach your team and work to improve your brand’s reputation.
Using these warning signs, you can build a scorecard to benchmark the performance of your call center agents. If you notice one or more of these warning signs during your audit, then building a coaching program for your call center is definitely a good idea.
3 Steps to a Complete Call Center Coaching Program
Coaching is a relatively straightforward activity—but it’s far from easy. Before rolling out a coaching program, it’s advisable to set clear goals for what you want to accomplish.
Choose Targeted Coaching Techniques
When deciding which coaching methods to use, consider a blend of approaches to accommodate the diverse learning styles of your call center agents. Some common coaching techniques include side-by-side mentoring, group workshops, motivational interviewing, and listening session reviews.
Regardless of the coaching method or technique you choose, you should be sure to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your agents to determine which approaches will provide the most benefits for the individuals on your team.
Improve Both Hard and Soft Skills
Hard skills like navigating call center software, resolving technical issues, and conveying specialized knowledge are foundational to quality customer interactions. As you roll out your coaching program, you should help your call center agents reinforce their processes for accessing your center’s knowledge bases, ticketing systems, and internal resources.
Although coaching your agents on hard skills is essential for making sure they can resolve customer support requests, soft skills are just as important. Your soft skills coaching should focus on building rapport with customers through tone, conversation flow, personalization, and using empathy to de-escalate frustrated callers. You can also introduce 1:1 feedback sessions with your support agents to address gaps in courtesy, active listening, and verbal cues.
Incorporate Software for Enhanced Coaching
Many of the latest call center software providers will boast built-in coaching features to guide agents through the support process and real-time transcription for post-call feedback. By utilizing the features found in these tools, your managers can provide tailored 1:1 coaching to your support agents at scale.
You can also use call center software to track success metrics like average handle times (AHT) and first-call resolution rates. Some AI analytics even deliver individualized coaching insights based on this data. Lastly, you can use eLearning software to centralize your coaching and skill-building modules, allowing your agents to access your curriculum independently between coaching sessions.
6 Call Center Coaching Best Practices
Once you decide it’s time to start coaching your call center agents, you may be tempted to get started right away. Before you do, however, you should familiarize yourself with the best practices for coaching your support employees—that way, you can get the most out of your coaching efforts.
- Set Clear Coaching Goals: Before you start coaching your agents, define the specific metrics and call center service levels you want to improve through coaching. This will help keep your agents focused on developing skills that are closely tied to improving the quality of their support calls.
- Tailor Your Coaching to Each Agent: Effective coaching is never a one-size-fits-all activity. To improve your training, you should aim to tailor your coaching approach based on the experience levels, learning styles, and strengths and weaknesses of your call center agents.
- Use Active Listening Methods: Building engagement with your support agents requires you to listen and try to understand their perspectives, challenges, and questions without judgment. Reflect back on what you hear and take their personal needs into account as you work through your coaching curriculum.
- Ask Open-Ended Questions: It’s usually a good idea to use “what if” questions to promote critical thinking and increase engagement during your coaching sessions. By guiding agents toward solutions instead of supplying fixes, they will be more likely to retain and apply what they learn.
- Provide Sandwich Method Criticisms: Giving genuine praise is a critical part of the coaching process. Be sure to celebrate your agent’s wins before and after, highlighting any areas for improvement in the middle.
- Develop Consistent Training Materials: Make sure to document your coaching frameworks with templates and tools that your managers can use, as this will ensure that you are providing a consistent coaching experience across your customer support teams.
How to Overcome Potential Coaching Roadblocks
It’s already difficult enough to build a coaching program from scratch, but trying to get buy-in from your employees can be just as difficult. This is why it’s important to avoid certain roadblocks while rolling out mandatory employee training for the first time.
Keep an eye on the following:
Agent Resistance
Some of your support agents may reject coaching or disengage from your constructive criticisms entirely. If you see this happening, try using motivational or permission-based approaches instead. By partnering with—rather than forcing—your employees to improve their performance, you may be more likely to notice increased engagement rates and improved support performance across your call center.
Inconsistent Training and Coaching Methods
When your training and coaching techniques vary widely, it can become difficult to track progress across your entire team of support agents. In other words, you need a control variable to determine whether or not your training methods are effective.
To ensure your coaching is effective, be sure to document your coaching frameworks in advance. Then, whenever and wherever necessary, invest in manager training and provide constructive feedback to your agents.
Lack of Buy-In
Gaining organization-wide support is key. Otherwise, your coaching efforts will just go in one ear and out the other. That said, you can rally your organization’s key stakeholders around your coaching program by demonstrating how it will improve both customer support and business performance.
Scaling Your Coaching Program
Once you’ve built a coaching framework that can effectively sharpen your team’s skills and improve your call center’s overall performance metrics, you may want to consider expanding your training across the broader organization.
You’ll want to start by documenting your coaching best practices into an official playbook that includes templates for goal-setting, simulated call scripts, feedback forms, and more. Then, you should consider identifying top performers across your team who may be good candidates to educate their peers.
Once you’ve got your curriculum documented, you should develop an online learning path that agents can access to to foster self-improvement. This will allow you to distribute your learnings at scale without needing to meet 1:1 with all of your support agents individually.
By scaling your coaching program across your entire call center, your agents will be primed to deliver exceptional customer service.