What is Call Center Coaching?
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 are not the same as a retrospective annual performance review; 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. CXone quality management software provides such tools for managers and supervisors to coach employees, track coaching completion, and monitor performance improvement. CXone quality management software also enables quick-hit coaching by delivering coaching packages to agents directly to their agent interface so they can work on improvement in between customer interactions. This helps you 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.
How NICE can help
NICE CXone is the market leading call center software in use by thousands of customers worldwide. Our solutions help call centers coach employees for swift and effective improvement. Our user-friendly reporting solutions provide the information call centers need to monitor and analyze performance. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help companies maintain and improve call center operations and meet call center service level standards. CXone includes:
Quality Management Analytics – simplifies management, analyzing each interaction based on category, sentiment, and user-defined keywords/phrases, delivering sophisticated analytical capabilities without an army of experts.
Workforce Engagement – unlocks your team’s potential by providing tools to inspire employee self-improvement, amplify quality to enhance customer experience, reduce labor waste, and ensure regulatory compliance. Solutions include workforce management (WFM), quality management (QM), recording, and performance management (PM).
