Complete Guide to
Contact Center Performance Coaching
What is Performance Coaching?
One of the greatest challenges for modern organizations is releasing the full potential of their people while aligning personal development goals with overall business objectives. Performance coaching comes in many forms, but the methods used by companies to motivate their staff, communicate corporate goals, measure and reward performance and plan effectively for continuous improvement all form the basis of a comprehensive performance coaching program.
Gartner defines Performance Coaching and Management as the combination of methodologies and metrics that enable users to define, monitor and optimize outcomes necessary to achieve organizational goals and objectives.
Productive performance coaching is built on three key pillars, and we can pull those from Gartner’s definition above: insights, quality conversations and forward looking. Using key metrics managers can better understand the needs of their employees and have candid two-way conversation, encouraging regular, direct and supportive feedback of progress. Successful organizations strive to create an environment where the individual takes responsibility for their own skills, behaviors and contributions. Effective performance coaching is about introducing a culture where everyone wins—because the key focus is on shared learning and continuous improvement. It is so much more than quarterly objective-setting and traditional annual reviews. This leads to future success of the employee and organization.
10-point Checklist for Implementing Performance Coaching
You don’t want to retrofit a performance coaching solution after implementing it. First, create a structure for contact center training – both induction and continuous – to help find the right solution. What type of metrics will you use to track agent progress and assess the key customer satisfaction and business drivers to create quality scorecards? Then, consider which types of training/online learning techniques you need to achieve positive business and customer outcomes.
Avoid a random, hit and miss approach. Aim to filter contacts through ticket type, status, and close date so that you can evaluate calls with the most valuable insights.
For example, by filtering calls by longest handling time, you may be able to spot broken processes, knowledge gaps and key training priorities. Also make sure to setup your performance coaching solution with a filtering function to track specific metrics that you wish to target.
It can be tricky to ensure consistent and fair evaluations, especially in large contact centers with multiple people analyzing calls. The best performance coaching solutions include a calibration feature that makes it easy to compare analyst responses.
Sometimes agents will disagree with a quality score, and blindly accepting that negative score without challenge can grow resentment. Offering the ability to challenge via a simple button-click allows frontline staff to express their own perspective on performance scores, while helping set better expectations and unearthing new coaching opportunities.
A good performance coaching system allows managers to create proactive training modules developed to engage all skill sets. Aim to include videos, quizzes and leader boards and make sure the performance coaching solution can accommodate a variety of training materials and techniques.
When done properly, gamification is a real game-changer for staff engagement, motivation, and training. Even better, when paired with incentives from an online store, a gamified solution allows agents to trade the points that they earn for company gear, donations, or other benefits.
Introduce alerts to proactively send agents feedback and better engage them with their performance. Through these alerts, leaders can also be made aware of regulatory, compliance and adherence problems, allowing them to better manage their teams and safeguard performance.
Contact centers typically generate performance data in several different systems. However, pulling and analyzing all this data manually is time-consuming and inefficient. Consider how a performance coaching solution would integrate with your existing contact center technology.
The key to great performance in one channel is different from another. An ideal performance coaching solution gives contact centers the chance to score differently across each channel, a solution that pulls together phone, email, text, chat and social media into a single view of customer interactions. Having one single viewpoint, agents don’t have to switch between multiple screens and that increases their overall performance.
Introducing Calabrio ONE
Calabrio ONE enables an intelligent, analytics-fueled approach to enterprise performance coaching cycles. Calabrio Performance Coaching, available starting January 2022, is part of Calabrio ONE – the all-in-one Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) suite that revolutionizes the way enterprises engage their employees as well as their customers. Calabrio ONE combines call recording, quality management, workforce management, multichannel voice-of-the-customer analytics with Data Management on a single, integrated platform:
Interaction recording
Quality Management
Workforce Management
Analytics
