Call center coaching is an essential part of the agent onboarding process, but providing ongoing agent training and regular performance feedback is equally important. Effective call center agent coaching clarifies performance expectations, creates a consistent customer experience, and improves CSAT scores.
Coaching tools help call center managers identify agent strengths and weaknesses, evaluate the effectiveness of current training materials, and increase employee engagement and retention rates. Ongoing agent training, especially when coupled with real-time call center activity monitoring and call recording, uncovers insights that streamline the customer journey, improve the agent scheduling process, and increase first contact resolution rates.
This post outlines different agent coaching strategies and tools, highlights potential challenges in the coaching process and their solutions, and includes actionable tips and tricks to optimize agent training at your call center.
What Is Call Center Coaching?
Call center coaching is an ongoing quality management process that monitors, evaluates, and optimizes agent performance to improve CSAT scores, agent skill sets, and customer experience.
Although call center coaching may inform annual performance reviews and be used in the initial onboarding process, coaching sessions are frequent, shorter, and designed to continuously upskill agents during their call center tenure.
The call center coaching process includes:
- Call Monitoring and In-Call Coaching: Managers monitor calls between agents and customers in real-time or post-call using call recording and transcription. During live calls, agents may receive automated next-best-action suggestions or personalized coaching from managers via chat messaging or call whisper.
- Performance Scoring: Agent performance is evaluated according to customizable scoresheets, checklists, customer feedback, or by monitoring changes in KPIs. Performance scoring provides constructive feedback, identifies specific examples for performance improvement, and automates much of the QA process.
- Post-Call Agent Coaching: Post-call coaching varies according to the agent’s performance evaluation results, but can include automated training module assignment, individualized 1:1 coaching, self-assessment so agents can evaluate their own performance, peer coaching, conversation simulators, and more. The goal of post-call coaching is to give agents clear feedback and actionable guidance on how to improve their performance.
- Performance Analytics: Call center managers can set up real-time KPI alerts, review historical quality management trends, or leverage insights from speech and text analytics to optimize the agent training process and evaluate customer sentiment. Managers can also track individual employee progress over time to evaluate the efficiency of their current coaching strategies, identify top performers, and further develop agent skill sets.
Types of Call Center Coaching
There are a variety of call center coaching types, each designed to help agents identify areas for improvement, develop their hard and soft skills, understand their strengths, and provide better customer service and support.
The most popular types of call center coaching are:
In-Call Coaching
In-call coaching is when individual agents receive real-time feedback and guidance during live customer calls. Though in-call coaching can be entirely automated with Agent Assist, it’s usually more effective when supervisors use call monitoring to listen in on active calls and coach agents using call whisper or chat messaging.
In-call coaching may include real-time call transcription, agent performance scoring, customer sentiment analysis, and CSAT scoring. In-call coaching is best for training newer agents, providing immediate support to struggling agents, and monitoring more experienced agents as a part of the Quality Assurance process.
Post-Call Coaching
Often used in conjunction with in-call coaching, post-call coaching refers to the agent coaching and training that takes place after a call has ended. Post-call coaching is more detailed and provides individualized agent feedback based on the entire interaction–including performance scores, customer survey responses, call outcomes, and fluctuations in KPIs.
Agents can receive one-on-one coaching from supervisors, be assigned specific training modules to improve certain aspects of their performance, be assigned a peer mentor, or review scoresheet breakdowns to conduct a self-assessment. Because post-call coaching is time-consuming and usually includes 1:1 contact center coaching from a peer or supervisor, it’s best for smaller call centers that need to upskill existing agents instead of hiring new ones.
Product and Service Training
New agents will receive product and service training as a part of the onboarding process–but continued product and service coaching helps maintain a consistent and up-to-date customer experience. Product and service coaching can take place in a classroom, on the job, via video conferencing, or through self-guided online courses that allow remote agents to go at their own pace. In most cases, product and service training is a group activity, allowing for peer coaching and collaboration alongside supervisor instruction.
AI-Powered Coaching and Simulations
AI coaching simulators provide zero-risk role-play scenarios that let agents develop and improve their skill sets by interacting with human-like bots.
These AI coaching tools can ask agents questions, take on different emotions, test agent product knowledge, make various sales and service requests, and provide instant performance feedback. AI-powered customer conversation simulations can increase CSAT scores by up to 50% and help agents achieve 70% faster speed-to-proficiency–making them an ideal fit for enterprise contact centers or teams with limited resources to dedicate to agent coaching.[*]
Soft Skill Training
87% of consumers say an agent’s tone of voice is the most important part of the customer communication experience–meaning soft skills like empathy, active listening, and adaptability are essential aspects of the call center coaching process.[*] These skills improve an agent’s phone etiquette, help with emotional regulation when dealing with difficult customers, and increase consumer trust. If agent attrition is high, CSAT scores are low, and agents are burned out from abusive customers, soft skill coaching can help.
Common Challenges with Call Center Coaching
Call center coaching comes with a fair share of challenges, but combining the right technology with creative problem-solving can eliminate or reduce most of them. Being aware of some of the top call center coaching challenges is the first step–but don’t worry, we provide solutions to all these problems and more in the best practices section of this post.
Inconsistent Coaching
Outdated training materials and knowledge bases, conflicting feedback from different managers, and the failure to develop clear customer communication guidelines spell disaster for your call center. Frequently review and update training materials, ensure knowledge base articles and agent call scripts have a consistent brand voice, and eliminate communication silos between managers.
Infrequent Coaching
Too often, call centers take a “one-and-done” approach to employee training. Inexperienced call center managers place all their focus on a lengthy (and exhausting) onboarding process at the expense of continuing education and daily micro-coaching. The truth is that agents require about 4 coaching sessions before they fully implement a new skill–and the first coaching session is rarely effective.[*] Automated post-call performance scores and AI Agent Assist monitor 100% of interactions and provide instant, daily feedback without the time commitment of 1:1 live coaching.
High Agent Turnover
Given that call centers already have an incredibly high turnover rate, it can be difficult to justify the time and financial investment that successful call center coaching requires. You may invest hundreds of hours (and thousands of dollars) coaching an agent, only to have them suddenly quit. While the stress of working in a call center means your agent turnover rate may never be as low as you want it to be, there are things you can do to increase agent retention and boost employee engagement. Frequently collect anonymous employee feedback, implement agent recognition and rewards programs, gamify performance management, and optimize agent schedules and soft skill training to prevent burnout.
Increased Call Volume
Especially in smaller call centers, an unexpected increase in call volume leaves little time for extended coaching. Even if call volumes are steady, it’s still hard to find enough time for 30-minute 1:1 coaching sessions with managers or peers–especially given that it takes 10-14 hours of coaching for an agent to fully develop a new skill. Creating coaching materials like scoresheets, knowledge bases, and training modules can take up to 5 times as long as the actual coaching process.[*] While GenAI automatically creates knowledge base content and AI-powered feedback eliminates the need for extensive 1:1 coaching, finding enough time for effective coaching remains a challenge.
Best Practices for Call Center Coaching
Best practices for effective call center coaching include:
Use Call Monitoring and Recording
Call monitoring tools let managers listen in on real-time interactions between customers and agents without either party’s knowledge. If needed, managers can use call whisper to coach agents without the customer hearing them, or instant message agents with coaching advice.
Call recording and transcription tools let managers review customer-agent conversations at any time. Admins can use call recordings to create a “best practices playlist” of excellent customer interactions, ideal for continued coaching and agent onboarding.
Create Agent Scorecards
Customizable or template-based scorecards are a standardized way to evaluate individual agent performance and identify areas for improvement. Admins can create questions, add one or more acceptable answers, assign different point values, and add trigger words/phrases for automated scoring.
Most scorecards function as a kind of checklist to ensure that agents follow service and support interaction guidelines. Agents can instantly review their scorecards once an interaction is complete, and admins can receive real-time alerts when an agent’s score drops below a certain level. Based on the agent’s grade/score, admins can automatically assign the agent relevant training modules--and block them from accepting new customer conversations until they’ve completed their assignments.
Automate Coaching With AI Agent Assist
Agent Assist tools integrate with your internal knowledge base and CRM tools to provide automated next-best action suggestions to agents during live customer conversations.
Agent Assist uses machine learning, Natural Language Processing, and customer sentiment/intent analysis to make context-best suggestions, and agents don’t lose time manually searching for data. AI Assist empowers contact center agents, eliminates excessive customer follow-ups, and provides automated in-call training sessions.
Gamify Coaching and Quality Management
Gamifying performance evaluation and coaching processes increases agent engagement, boosts productivity levels, highlights top performers, and makes agent training fun. Call center gamification tools set clear benchmarks for success, reinforce essential coaching concepts, and help agents determine and develop their skill sets. Admins can create individual or team-based challenges, enable real-time performance wallboards, and display leaderboards to the entire office for a sense of friendly competition.
Gamification makes it easy to recognize and reward your best agents–a key to increased agent retention, given that 31% of agents feel undervalued and unappreciated at work.[*]
Send Out Customer and Agent Surveys
66% of call center leaders say combining post-call customer surveys with QA monitoring is the most effective way to improve CSAT scores.[*] Results from customer surveys highlight gaps in employee training, and can be shared directly with agents for more individualized feedback. Agent surveys are just as valuable, allowing team members to share their feedback about existing training materials and your call center’s coaching process. Agents can offer suggestions about how to improve the coaching process, bring your attention to unrealistic standards or KPI goals, and let you know which topics they’re still struggling to grasp.
Set Clear Performance Monitoring KPIs
While agent scorecards and customer surveys give call center managers deep insight into agent performance and highlight coaching opportunities, live and historical KPI monitoring is equally essential. Admins can set up real-time KPI alerts when agent performance drops below a certain threshold to optimize in-call coaching techniques. Monitoring specific metrics helps you set clear performance goals, monitor agent progress over time, and evaluate the effectiveness of your current coaching strategy. Popular call center quality management KPIs include first call resolution, average handle time, call transfer rate, and CSAT/NPS scores.
Leverage Conversational Analytics
Although standard KPIs are a helpful tool for evaluating agent performance and optimizing coaching strategies, quantitative analytics only tell part of the story. Unlike random conversation sampling, conversational analytics monitor 100% of calls and recording transcriptions. That’s why 54% of contact center leaders say speech analytics is a useful tool for automating coaching scorecards–and 51% leverage speech analytics to provide key coaching insights.[*]
Speech and text analytics leverage customer sentiment analysis and emotion detection to evaluate agent performance and soft skills, identify common problems and support topics, and even monitor how often agents use filler words like “um.” Some conversational analytics tools include silence and overtalk detection to evaluate interaction flow, while others track coaching effectiveness, monitor how much an agent’s performance has improved over time, and track agent progression through assigned coaching materials. Admins can filter analytics by call type, individual agent, date range, support topic, department, and more.
Embrace Microlearning
Instead of hosting days-long training seminars and hours-long coaching sessions, keep performance feedback short and sweet with microlearning. Microlearning coaching sessions are highly targeted, address only one topic at a time, and last between 3-5 minutes. Microlearning increases retention rates by 25-60% and can cut agent training and development costs by up to 50%.[*] Microlearning helps admins create clear action plans and keeps training schedules achievable and realistic, reducing agent burnout.
The Benefits of Call Center Coaching
Effective call center coaching comes with numerous benefits, including higher CSAT scores, increased conversions, simplified agent upskilling, and a more efficient support process. Implementing the best practices highlighted in this post ensures an agile call center agent coaching strategy with clear, consistent performance expectations. Setting realistic performance goals, recognizing top performers, leveraging AI to automate basic coaching, and constantly monitoring customer and agent feedback can speed up the onboarding process, increase FCR, and boost agent retention rates.
Our guide to WFM and WEM software makes it easy to compare top coaching platforms, their available features and pricing, and overall user experience.
FAQs
Below, we’ve answered the top call center coaching FAQs.
