eClerx Customer Operations – Eight Strategies to effectively coach call center agents and improve customer experience

Coaching call center agents can be challenging and time-consuming with uneven results. But it doesn’t have to be. A call center is only as successful as its agents. To achieve long-term success, the focus should be on continually coaching your agents. A dedicated, consistent approach combined with sound knowledge is desirable for optimal coaching. The main goals of coaching include training agents to reply promptly to customer requests, complying with quality and compliance metrics and avoiding sounding scripted. The road to improvement is more complex than following a playbook. Identifying agents’ strengths and weaknesses is vital for success. Equally important is identifying roadblocks that hinder performance improvement and working with agents to overcome these obstacles.

Positive customer experience is critical to call center operations. The first step to improving customer experience is heightening agent awareness about the critical nature of the customer journey and their interactions with customers. By reinforcing key elements during training sessions and incorporating customer experience as a key performance indicator on scorecards, organizations can effectively connect the dots between the agent and the customer. Using incentives to encourage strong performance is crucial. For instance, consider presenting rewards and recognition during company events and implementing remedial measures and improvement plans when agent performance is sub-par.

As experienced and proficient as your supervisor and team leads may be at providing performance feedback, it is the customers’ direct comments that often have the biggest impact on agent development. Use the following elements to create and implement a comprehensive guide for improving agent interactions:

• Customer feedback
• Supervisor best practices
• Quality coaching guidelines
• In-depth self-assessments

Agents are typically quite critical of their own performance. The best way to identify strengths and weaknesses is to have agents observe their interactions with customers. Supervisors and quality coaches should fortify self-assessments with performance calibrations to ensure agents truly understand what is expected of them in order to deliver optimal customer experience.

Effective coaching requires more than a Set-it-and-forget-it approach. Conduct performance reviews periodically to maintain focus on KPIs. The review process will help determine the distribution of incentives, rewards and recognize superior agent performance.

If you don’t challenge your agents, some may be prone to stagnate and settle into a routine. Given the ever-evolving list of policies, procedures, new products and services, it’s imperative to assess how well agents understand changes and are able to effectively communicate them to customers. Process re-verification training should be conducted regularly to ensure agents are proficient in the products, policies and procedures they support.

Many organizations incorporate a close loop system to transparently share feedback from customers and supervisors. Another option is to employ quality coach audits to provide a simple, holistic feedback system. Combining all these components is important for action planning and closing the feedback loop.

A great way to show agents how to improve is the use of recordings of Call, email and chat transcripts from past interactions that demonstrate a desired skill or behavior you’d like the agent to emulate. A repository containing best in class calls and chats is an effective tool to provide coaching and training to agents. Be advised that some agents may not show improvement despite being coached on specific behaviors. This may mean that although the agent understands where they fell short, they don’t understand exactly how these behaviors are demonstrated.

eClerx Customer Experience team deploys Strategic Monitoring through Automation and Robotics Technology (SMART).

• eClerx’s Automated Workflow Systems and Reporting Portal offers call center management teams the ability to:
  • Report performance through agent scorecards
  • Share feedback with agents on a near real-time basis
  • Ensure sufficient gaps between consecutive audits to optimize agent feedback
  • Enable the closed loop process to improve performance through accountability

• Auto Calibration Tool enables our clients and their vendor partners to:
  • Create, schedule and manage custom calibration surveys
  • Monitor the effectiveness of calibration sessions to optimize the agenda

• Call Library enables call center management to:
  • Build a custom repository of desirable call clips to educate agents and enhance call handling skills
  • Allow call clips to be tagged and searched by call type, product and other variables by relevance
  • Assign call clips to team members as an alternative to coaching

Conclusion:

Coaching is a valuable tool to empower call center agents while allowing for the collaboration necessary to provide outstanding customer service. eClerx’ s eight strategies can help businesses maximize coaching efforts, support call center agents in achieving their goals and ultimately enhance the customer journey. Equipping call center agents with knowledge updates, strengthening existing skills and applying new ones optimizes customer experience, compliance, and productivity.