Contact centers remain competitive based on customer experience and the performance of its team members. Workforce management solutions allocate resources to meet forecasted demands but are just one of the ways to ensure a thriving and relevant contact center with a great, overall performance.
Everyone is different and each day poses different challenges. Even top performers can have less than perfect customer interactions. Effective coaching will encourage team members with resources and training needed to manage stress, avoid burnout and consistently provide great customer service.
Coaching Wins
It’s hard to debate the impact of coaching on individuals and teams. The success of any organization depends on the people who deliver excellent customer outcomes, especially those contact centers that represent other brands. Having a successful quality management program in place infiltrates into every area of today’s contact center. When keeping customer satisfaction high and agent level frustrations low, everyone wins.
Why Coaching Is Paramount to Contact Center Success
Etech Global Services knows first-hand the role that coaching has in developing an entire organization. For many, the opportunity to coach can be overwhelming and the process often misunderstood. Taking the guesswork out of coaching by learning how to give actionable feedback to agents during one-on-one training sessions will provide an essential channel to recognize people with leadership potential and find opportunities to grow and retain top talent. One on one coaching allows agents to get targeted training, express their own concerns and feel heard. In return, coaches can keep their most valuable talent in your organization productive and happy.
Happy team members make happy customers and will focus on delivering high-quality service, every time.
Who Makes a Good Coach?
Managing people and preparing them for excellence takes special talent. This talented person exudes positivity and always has an encouraging word for frustrated team members who come to them for advice. Having good judgment, being able to make quick decisions, staying calm under pressure while also having, organizational and people skills, are all the qualities for being a great coach.
Your best coaches aren’t always necessarily the managers and supervisors that oversee day-to-day operations. Some of the most effective coaches are those that know how to guide conversations to a satisfying conclusion for customers, as well as on behalf of their agents.
How to Deliver Solid Contact Center Coaching
Establish an effective process coaches can use to guide team members and improve performance. For example, role-playing is a great way you can demonstrate how to successfully rebuttal client objectives using tact and skill learned during training. This type of training can give quick results, resulting in higher sales, better call dispositions and greater agent confidence. Simulating customer and agent interactions by using real situations for coaching will give team members unique feedback they will remember and be able to use the next time they are in an interaction with your customers.
When agents see that the coaching works, they will be more confident and be able to share what they know with the rest of their team members. Give team members ideas as they work through various scenarios. Use real-world examples and give them the freedom to make the rebuttals their own. Strengthening your team members will help them become top performers and top-performing team members often turn out to be the best coaches.
Employ Self-Assessments During Coaching Sessions
Don’t assume your team members are oblivious to their performance shortcomings. There are times if a customer is upset that an agent will know that things didn’t go very well but the most effective coaching can come when seeing specific areas that need improvement.
Consistent coaching is for everyone. Everyone can always get better. Coaching isn’t about picking apart every interaction but finding areas where improvements can be made and giving your team ways to make it happen.
.Having the right information and data while understanding how to get the best from your team is more than just science. It takes the right combination of practical knowledge and application to help agents fine-tune their performance for personal and professional success.
VIRTUAL COACHING
At the end of the day, coaching is a crucial part of today’s call center, especially with the changes and challenges we all are facing at this time, during COVID 19.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, contact centers have faced challenges they never faced before. For the safety of our employees, Etech also had to face those challenges. Within a matter of days, Etech moved thousands of agents, from around the world, to work from home.
Challenges of having internet connections, equipment, tools and the resources needed were at the forefront. With Etech Insights already in place, we were ready to stay on top of the situation. We were able to provide the same quality monitoring program that we had in place for our contact centers, virtually. Etech Insights pulled data to see how customers were feeling, what they were thinking and monitor how agents were responding to customer concerns, as well as how they were adjusting to their new work environments. Monitoring agent and customer frustrations gave us actionable feedback, in order to adjust our training, creating efficient, smooth customer/agent interactions.
Quality monitoring let us know exactly what the agents and customers were experiencing, allowing coaches to provide all of the training they had used in the call center, to then effectively coach their team members from home.
While one on one training continued virtually between agents and coaches, Etech’s QEval platform also proved instrumental by offering a self-coaching training wizard and a training site for agents to learn, play games, compete and train on their own, while staying connected to their team. Our QEval software delivers the resources and support agents need in order to stay motivated and perform well by offering training modules (pdfs, videos, mp3s, etc..) built right into the appropriate parameters where agents need help the most. QEval is a fully customizable platform that has been such an important part of meeting agent training needs, virtually.
As the needs of customers and agents changed, coaching also had to change and adapt. Having these resources already in place helped Etech transition from contact center stations to home stations, rather seamlessly. Using a combination of Etech Insights and QEval, along with great, supportive coaches, provided a firm foundation to ensure that not only our customers were well taken care of during the pandemic but that our agents stayed healthy, having the virtual capabilities to grow and flourish professionally, in what could have been an otherwise chaotic transition.
Coaching is more important now than ever and is so vitally important to who we are, what we do and how we do it.
At Etech Global Services, we know that good leadership inspires people to perform well, regardless of the circumstances. The strategies we use at Etech empower our leaders, coaches and team members to drive success.