Understanding the Coaching Process
For many, contact center agent training and contact center coaching are two separate and distinct activities. Contrary to this belief, these two contact center activities are both complimentary and supportive. Training is designed to deliver knowledge and skills. The purpose of coaching is two-fold; to create a quality customer experience and to reenforce the training delivered.
Why the focus on Coaching?
On average, a customer needs to interact with your brand 5-7 before they remember your brand, let alone make a purchase from your brand. With the introduction of omnichannel contact center solutions your client can be interacting with the website, SMS, online chat, email, inbound or outbound phone, social media, or any other communication channel. For a majority of these interactions, they are handled within your contact center. How you care for them, explain the services to them, and mannerisms determine the experience they have. This makes the contact center a crucial part of the client experience.
Because this is such a crucial part, you need to make sure that your agents are delivering a quality experience. If your agents are not delivering that type of service, they need to be appropriately coached. This is not the typical tear them down and start all over approach. This approach is designed to help the agents come up with their own answers to how to do it better. It is to empower them to understand that they have the power within them to be successful and create this quality experience. We want to assist them in a manner that takes customer experience to another realm.
How many times, have you created a masterful training and are excited to deliver this to your contact center agents. The concept you are training is something you are passionate about and know will help their performance. You took exhaustive amounts of time to curate content to share in your training. The training couldn’t have been delivered better and you send them out to implement your training. Not soon afterwards, you notice hardly anyone implemented your training. Why? Because coaching was not reenforcing what was trained.
The biggest issue with training or coaching is follow up. Consider coaching the follow up to your training. To coach effectively, you must employ the “coaching up” process.
Coaching Process
The Coaching process is designed with 5 basic steps: Identify the Need, Discussion, Role Play, Commitment, and Follow Up.
Identify the Need
Never start a coaching session without knowing what you need to coach on. This could be follow-up from a training recently completed or based upon performance metrics or quality evaluations. Regardless the method for determining what to coach on, take copious notes. It is important to give specific detailed feedback.
Decide what to coach using the Primary and Secondary method. The Primary topic will be the biggest impact item. Even though there might be many opportunities to coach, you need to only pick a primary and secondary.
Discussion
We have the tendency to tell the contact center agent what they need to do, but your coaching will be more effective by asking questions to help them see, for themselves, what they need to work on. If the contact center agent feels the idea is their own, they are more likely to working on improving that specific area.
Sometimes you will need to guide them in the right direction. If they feel they did everything right, you will need to go into a discussion more directed by you. Always try to create buy in by getting them to answer the question, even if you have to direct them.
Role Play
In a recent study done over multiple years, contact center agents rated role plays as one of the top three ways they learn and retain trainings. This is crucial to coaching because this allows you to recreate a particular situation. You can start and stop where you feel it is necessary. You can also go back and do it again until you feel the agent gets it. Make sure you find a way during to role play to make it authentic and real as possible.
Commitment
Like discussion above, creating a commitment is a two-way street. The more the commitment is their idea, the more they will be bought in and follow through with that commitment. You are getting a commitment from the employee by having them repeat back to you, in their own words, what you have been working on and what they are going to do. They also need to tell you “Yes” they will do what they have come up with as a solution. If you did Discussion correctly, both you and the agent already have given a soft commitment of what are the next steps. This is the time to reinforce these.
Follow Up
This is the step that is most crucial and most often overlooked. Be specific for what will happen when you follow up and a specific time frame. Make sure you get back in the time frame you committed to, observe to ensure the behavior they agreed upon is being exhibited and reinforce this. Determine how much, if any, improvement you see or hear. If they are not 100% improved, plan to coach them again and even follow up the next day or shift.
Use Correct Tools
Having the correct training and coaching process is important, but having the correct tools is imperative to your success. FiveLumens has the features and capabilities managers needs to be able to effectively track and coach their contact center agents.
- With FiveLumens you can record every coaching session whether is stems from training, Quality Assurance, audits, or any other source.
- With FiveLumens you can track progress of all coaching sessions from overall account to an individual contact center agent.
- With FiveLumens you can customize coaching forms and sessions based upon groups, locations, channel, or any internal need.
- With FiveLumens you can see visibility into all coaching creating greater accountability from everyone within your organization.
FiveLumens contact center software makes coaching easy and effective. To learn more, get a demo.