Call Center Coaching Guide: Challenges, Tips, and Solutions

By Chris Kontes, Balto

Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the call center: coaching, while massively important, isn’t that fun for call center managers and agents alike. Many contact center managers avoid coaching, reporting that coaching one new skill takes at least 10 hours. Even so, most managers believe coaching is the most important thing they could be doing.

Coaching is a vaguely defined term in call center environments. For one call center, coaching is limited to providing feedback to agents after customer interactions, while for other call centers, coaching involves a broader approach that includes coaching sessions, on-the-job training, and mock calls.

Coaching can also be quite taxing for call center managers, particularly because it’s time-consuming and emotionally draining. However, good coaching is indispensable, and because it’s such a time-draining process, you’d want your coaching to actually be effective and turn into tangible results with a positive ROI.

Let’s explore the hurdles that stand in the way of effective coaching, and show how the right approach can help you get past them.

What is Call Center Coaching and Why is It Important?

Call center coaching is essential for maintaining service quality, meeting KPIs, and boosting employee productivity and satisfaction. It involves educating agents on their duties and how to perform them effectively, using tools like constructive feedback, assessments, and playbooks.

Unlike performance reviews, which evaluate past performance, coaching focuses on improving future performance. Both are essential and complementary: Quality Management assessments can inform targeted coaching sessions.

Coaching typically begins with identifying an agent’s problem area, such as a lack of technical knowledge. The agent must fully understand the issue, its importance, and how addressing it will improve their performance and customer satisfaction.

Hands-on practice with real-life examples and mock calls is crucial for effective coaching in contact centers.

You Need Call Center Coaching, Even if it Isn’t Fun

Contact center coaching isn’t always “fun”, though you can make it less boring by designing interactive educational activities for your agents. Still, it’s important to incorporate some form of coaching into your contact center’s agenda.

And we’re not just talking about onboarding here. Many contact center managers assume that training ends after the onboarding process, but without ongoing coaching, your agents will feel less engaged.

Not to mention, they’ll have a hard time figuring out how to improve their performance or overcome their weak points, which can also negatively impact your service quality and customer satisfaction scores.

Coaching Builds Trust and Maximizes Employee Engagement

Coaching builds mutual trust between call center managers and agents. Training your agents is a great way to show them that you’re actually invested in their personal and professional development, which motivates them to excel at their jobs and increases engagement.

At the same time, knowing that your agents are well-trained for the job makes you confident in their ability to do their job effectively. You may also consider collecting feedback on your coaching program to demonstrate your openness to negative feedback and commitment to maximizing the program’s value.

Coaching Improves Contact Center KPIs

Investing in well-designed coaching programs can directly have a positive impact on your contact center performance and relevant KPI targets.

By providing agents with the knowledge, practice, and resources they need to go above and beyond in their jobs, you’ll be able to meet your KPI targets, such as FCR (First Contact Resolution), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), and AHT (Average Handling Time).

To maximize the benefits of your coaching efforts, consider creating personalized training programs for each individual. By focusing on your agents’ unique strengths and weaknesses, you can help them improve their skills faster and overcome the problems they struggle with the most.

Effective Call Center Coaching Helps Agents Hit Their Targets

You can’t expect your agents to hit their targets if you don’t show them how to do it. By continuously training your agents and communicating issues as they arise, you’ll empower them to reach their goals faster.

Tools like call recording and speech analytics software help you identify the reasons behind low scores and evaluate contact center agent performance effectively. They also allow you to create customized training programs for each agent.

The Challenges of Good Call Center Coaching

We’ve all dealt with call center coaching challenges, and even though you might feel alone in your struggles, the truth is most of these issues are pretty common. Do any of these call center coaching techniques ring a…phone?

Good coaching preparation takes A LOT of time. Smart call center coaching methods take serious preparation. After all, nothing is more awkward than a bad coaching session between managers and agents. Being stuck in a conference room with disengaged agents isn’t anyone’s idea of a good time, so preparation and planning are key. But even armed with contact center training program outlines, managers have to put in work before a session. In fact, most managers spend 5x as much time prepping as they do coaching.

Coaching wreaks havoc on contact center bandwidth. During coaching sessions, call center reps and agents need to stop customer interactions and speaking with prospective customers, which is their job. With so many call centers already at capacity, that’s a no-go.

Coaching doesn’t scale. Let’s say a call center manager with 100 agents has an excellent 30-minute coaching session with an individual agent. Naturally, the call center manager might want to provide that training for the rest of the agents. But that could take literally 50 hours — that’s more than two full days, and well over a full work week. So even if you were to crack the call center coaching code, it’s still almost impossible to deploy at scale.

These are a few of the most common challenges with call center coaching, but there are plenty more.

Coaching Strategy Example

There are a few call center training principles to keep in mind: keep your coaching short, focused, and fun.

1. Keep Your Call Center Coaching Short

Don’t hesitate to keep the call center coaching session under 10 minutes and hyper-focused on a single coaching objective – it will save you time, be a lot more fun, and call center agents are much more likely to remember and apply what they’ve learned.

2. Keep Coaching Focused

It’s easy to try and cover too much in a coaching session. After all, there are always a million things we could be doing better, from talk speed to active listening, objection handling (sales), or average handle times (customer service).

For example, let’s say you’d like to coach an agent on opening statements. Let’s break introductory statements down further, like this:

• High-Level Call Center Coaching Goal: “I want to coach my agents on Introductory Statements.”
• Drill Down 1: “Specifically, I want the tone of their conversation to be better.”
• Drill Down 2: “And their opening statements have a few parts. Let’s focus on the first sentence of the opening statement.” Rather than coaching “opening statements,” you’re now coaching on “tone” in the first sentence of a conversation. Plus, it sets up the foundation for further call center coaching sessions, since you can easily map out micro-coaching sessions that build on each other.
3. Keep Your Coaching Fun

Short and focused lend themselves well to the fun. In a warm and fun tone, ask the agent to practice the first sentence of the conversation 10 times over (one practice run for each minute of the session). Make it fun and informal; agents might think it’s silly, but it keeps them energized and, more importantly, excited about future call center coaching sessions.

Balto empowers your agents with AI-enabled guidance and assistance during live calls in real-time, enabling them to handle complex situations more effectively. 

For more information, visit our website at www.balto.ai.