Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Would you listen to a coach if you knew he didn't know what he was talking about? Or: Do you think Super Bowl-winning teams are getting the correct coaching?

Call centers rely heavily on 'coaching' to improve performance. But as a recent white paper from Knowlagent, 'Seven Fundamental Plays from the Coaching All-Star Playbook,' shows, what gets called 'coaching' for many call centers ends up being little more than managing without improvement.


Activity, not progress: 'Eighty percent of executives in a study by Knowlagent indicated that they do not believe supervisors have all the right skills for coaching.' Obviously improving the skills of your coaches will go a long way to improving your agents' skills.

The white paper discusses broad approaches to take to improve the level of coaching your agents get. Make sure your coaching is targeted, hitting individual problems and issues specific to your call center. Make it frequent, not letting a few problem agents take up all your time. Keep it consistent, actionable and measurable - granted coaching is a difficult metric to assign hard numbers to, keep track of any correlations between the time an agent gets with coaches to any measurable improvements.

An important aspect of coaching that gets overlooked is requiring individual accountability. The paper hits hard the importance of a mechanism 'to take ownership for increasing  performance.' Without such a specific goal, the paper warns, 'agents may be left adrift, becoming dissatisfied with the prospects for improvement or advancement.'

 

Also, find areas where agents can work independently to improve, it recommends, and identify places where hands-on interaction is necessary.

 

For more, check out the white paper HERE.