Call center coaching is a quality management activity to provide call center agents with feedback, examples, performance assessments, and best-practice activities to help improve the skillset needed for their role.Coaching sessions arenot the same as a retrospective annual performance reviews; rather, coaching is meant to improve performance moving forward. Coaching is also not a replacement for quality management (QM) evaluations, but is meant to complement evaluations as part of the QM process. Coaching is meant to provide specific, tailored feedback to inspire agents to perform to their highest potential and provide tangible guidance on how they can do so.
Once an area of weakness or opportunity has been identified, a leader typically approaches an individual agent or team to discuss the current state and how to improve. “Why” and “how” are hallmarks of effective coaching. When employees understand what needs to happen, why it needs to happen, and how they can make it happen, they are far likelier to make the improvements needed. Brainstorming ways to practice a particular behavior or process are also highly beneficial to agents; specific hands-on activities or assignments can help employees understand how to improve their own performance while also improving the customer experience.
Quality management software tools are essential to maintaining high performance. Coaching often requires software to stay easy, streamlined, and effective. NICE CXone quality management software provides such tools for managers and supervisors to coach employees, track coaching completion, and monitor performance improvement. The CXone quality management software also enables quick-hit coaching by delivering coaching packages directly to agent interfaces so they can work on improvement in between customer interactions. This helps transform agent idle time into development time, and ensures that the normal workday is disrupted as little as possible, in order to maintain service levels and call center performance.
