The importance of call centre agent coaching

A wise person once said – “you learn something new every day”. When it comes to creating a more efficient call centre and five-star agents, this couldn’t be truer. With consumer expectations on the rise and increased competition, the race is on to provide best-in-class call centre agent coaching that leads to top-notch customer service.

The good news is, investing in your contact centre to provide better service really does pay off. Our Moments That Matter research revealed that 86% of people are willing to pay more for better customer experiences, and yet, 46% of consumers felt let down by the service they received. The bad news? This directly translates into lost revenue for your business.

So, what can you do? Your agents are at the heart of great experiences. If you want them to do right by your customers, you need to invest in call centre agent coaching and offer continued support. With the right coaching in place, you’ll always be able to hit the right note and delight your customers.

In this blog, we’ll explore the importance of call centre agent coaching, from what it actually is and the benefits, to how to implement it effectively.

The importance of call centre agent coaching

First of all, what is call centre agent coaching? Call centre agent coaching is the process of training your agents, whether that’s the initial on-boarding training programme they go through when they first join the business, or regular training sessions designed to keep their skills sharp.

Believe it or not, very few contact centres are getting their training and coaching right. Around 58% of agents aren’t satisfied with the quality of the training they receive. This is damaging on multiple levels: it’s bad for agent morale, bad for your contact centre attrition rates, bad for your customers and, most of all, atrocious for your bottom line.

If you want a team of high-flying agents that are consistently hitting targets and going the extra mile, one-size-fits-all training isn’t going to cut the mustard. Each and every one of your agents is unique, which means your approach to coaching should be too. Delivering consistently excellent experiences requires you to create tailored coaching programmes that address the specific areas of improvement for each of your agents.

Sound difficult? It doesn’t need to be. With the right tools in place, you can make call centre agent coaching a breeze and develop winning coaching that will have a real impact.

The benefits of call centre agent training

If you’re not yet sold on the importance of call centre agent coaching, let’s look at the wealth of benefits it brings:

• Make customers happier by consistently delivering on contact centre KPIs , which in turn will lead to better customer retention rates and higher revenues..
• Improve upselling and cross-selling by identifying needs and solutions before your customer even thinks of them.
• With better agent training, you can boost morale and productivity, build resilience, and reduce your overall attrition rate by giving agents everything they need to nail every single call and feel good about the job they’re doing.
• Develop a competitive advantage with five-star training programmes, so your agents can focus on providing top-notch CX and handling more calls without increasing workload.
• Spend less time and money on onboarding new agents and, instead, focus on making sure your existing agents are able to nail the customer experience each and every time.

How to implement call centre agent coaching

Define the right KPIs for your agents

A key part of developing and refining effective contact centre agent coaching is to set clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs help you understand how your agents are performing against revenue expectations and customer targets. Common metrics include:

• Abandonment rate
• Average handle time (AHT)
• First contact resolution (FCR)

Use top performers to raise the bar

Once you know what good, great and best look like, it’s easy to start making improvements. Collecting data on how to influence more successful outcomes – courtesy of your top-performing agents – is the perfect way to develop winning scripts. Use call intelligence software to uncover the best calls and use them to rapidly upskill your teams, helping you deliver exceptional customer experiences without putting more pressure on your agents.

Align training with business objectives

If your agents understand why they’re doing things in a particular way, they’re better able to draw clear links between their actions and overarching goals, enabling them to remain focused on activities – and calls – that move the dial. Conversation Analytics helps you align training by automatically scoring and logging calls that lead to desired business-aligned outcomes. This means you can do more of the good stuff, and put a stop to activities that don’t align with wider business objectives

Focus on continuous improvement

It’s not enough to onboard your agents and leave them to it. If you want to provide better experiences – and reduce call centre attrition – continuous improvement is key. One of the simplest ways to make incremental improvements is right in front of you: collect real customer intel from calls that come into your contact centre.

With Agent ID, you can uncover the best calls to include in your coaching programmes, ensuring your customers are truly satisfied, without increasing waiting times and potentially missing sales opportunities. Because you have this data at your fingertips, and you don’t have to manually sift through every single call, it’s quick and easy to spot where agents can improve on a regular basis.

Empower your agents with the right tools

Let call centre software take some of the work out of your hands. Call monitoring solutions provide customer-centric data that enables your entire call centre to become better aligned with customer needs. You can enhance the quality of your calls and deflect low-value ones by tracking keywords and conversational trends. And, with automatic call scoring, logging and analysis, you can reduce admin such as After-Call Work (ACW).

How Conversation Analytics enhances your call centre agent coaching

Let Conversation Analytics do the hard work for you. With speech analytics in place, your call centres can begin surfacing hidden insights, highlight topics and keywords that drive positive outcomes, and analyse sentiment in every call. It tells you things such as:

• Why people are getting in touch, by monitoring and logging the topics of conversation, including any associated keywords and phrases.
• The outcome of each call, so you can surface trends from calls that delivered positive or successful outcomes.
• How customer sentiment is changing throughout the call, so you can pinpoint exactly what makes the phone call experience positive or negative and improve from there.

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When you put Conversation Analytics and Agent ID together, things get even more interesting. You can gain actionable insights into how well individual agents are handling the calls coming in, and going out, of your contact centre.

Plus, Conversation Analytics integrates seamlessly with many contact centre technologies and CRM systems, including Vocalcom. This means you can harness rich data automatically and draw links between calls and outcomes from a centralised location.  

Keen to craft coaching programmes that take customer experiences from dreary to dreamy?

Start a conversation with us today to find out how.