Coaching Sessions: Who Should Be Involved and Why
Creating coaching sessions is an ideal way to help drive your employees to a better standard of performance at their desks: no need to pull them away from their work for a face-to-face meeting in a stuffy conference room; no need to disrupt their schedule for longer than is absolutely necessary.
Just a fast, convenient, streamlined process to benefit your entire customer service team.
With an effective coaching program in place, employees will be encouraged and empowered to deliver the highest standard of work they can. But it’s not just them who have to get involved with coaching tasks — other key members of your workforce must take part too.
Who? How? Why? Let’s find out.
Customer Service Agents: Equipping Frontline Employees with Critical Skills
Your customer service agents are crucial to your business’s entire performance. Consumers want to contact a support team and receive responsive, friendly, effective help. They don’t want to be lumbered with a bunch of poorly-trained amateurs with no idea how to communicate properly and politely.
A survey by Salesforce reveals 84 percent of consumers consider being treated like a person (and not just a number) is ‘very important to winning their business’. That means your agents have to be able to engage them at a personal level and make them feel valued.
A responsible approach to coaching tasks maximizes your customer service agents’ communication skills and cultivates a more satisfying, engaging experience for your audience. But just as customers want a personalized service, your coaching responsibilities mean sessions should be tailored to each agent’s individual strengths and weaknesses too.
Focus on their good and bad points when delivering feedback. Address the best parts of recent customer interactions before tackling the worst in a tactful, constructive way. You can include different forms of media in your sessions too — images, audio, video etc. — to illustrate your points.
Agents will respond to coaching tasks that are clear and positive. Make objectives they can actually expect to hit in a realistic time instead of trying to push them beyond their capabilities. Agents who feel engaged, valued and respected will take your guidance on board and implement changes into their work.
Everyone wins when you take coaching responsibilities seriously. Customers enjoy better service from more competent agents, have extra reason to stay loyal and — hopefully — will boost their spending with your brand (existing buyers spend 67 percent more than new ones, on average).
QA Analysts: Evaluating, Reporting, Informing
Every company benefits from a quality assurance program.
It’s a no-brainer: your QA analysts pick up on problems management might miss, typically before they escalate and cause fractures in your customer relationships. They use scorecards to grade each interaction by checking certain custom questions relating to the performance, before providing this data to managers and team leaders.
Their findings play a massive role in building personalized coaching sessions for agents and fulfilling coaching responsibilities. Without QA analysts gathering results and giving you accurate breakdowns of performance, your coaching tasks are unlikely to benefit agents as much as they should.
Team Leaders: Building Better Leadership
Team leaders deliver coaching based on QA analysts’ results and, possibly, after consulting with managers. Deciding how best to actually address issues and guide agents to implement positive changes can be pretty daunting, which makes managerial input helpful when getting used to coaching responsibilities.
Team leaders using our QA software’s Coaching Sessions tool benefit from a streamlined system designed to make the process easier than ever before. You can choose from a variety of Feedback templates based on the issues to be addressed (whether high-priority or not), to minimize the amount of time spent constructing feedback.
Use the interactive coaching cards to organize and track coaching across the customer service team. Team leaders’ coaching responsibilities apply to large teams and trying to stay on top of every single agent’s needs is a challenge, but these cards reduce the risk of oversights.
Team leaders send coaching sessions to agents with notes to advise and encourage, along with deadlines. Setting a reasonable end-point creates structure for coaching and drives employees to complete objectives with more urgency.
As a team leader, you should compare results before and after coaching to gauge how effective sessions have been. This is easy to do with our system, as is showing the agent which areas to focus on.
Of course, as a team leader, you might actually benefit from a little help yourself from time to time. Sessions can be created by managers or other team leaders to improve your coaching skills. This benefits your agents, the customers and the business overall.
Admins: The Importance of Staying Organized
Admins should take an active role in coaching tasks. They can use our system to set operational goals for coaching sessions and build a library of Feedback templates, based on team leaders’ requirements over time. Establishing and expanding the Feedback templates ensures leaders have access to the most practical range at all times.
Administrators oversee access and privileges for agents and team leaders too. This means they should stay updated on which employees should be able to see what, so the coaching process maintains its flow. Any new team leaders or agents need to be assigned access within the system before they can take advantage of Coaching.
Another of an admin’s coaching responsibilities? Managing recognition. Our Karma Points and Karma Store allows for recognition badges and points to be assigned to agents based on their performance. Administrators are responsible for configuring this, applying points values to each type of badge based on input from managers and team leaders.
Conclusion
While coaching sessions are designed to help customer service agents deliver a better CX and be more productive, it’s a group effort overall:
- Access to critical performance data is fundamental for every coaching session
- Feedback and coaching has to be carefully constructed
- Agents and team leaders require appropriate access to important tools within our system
Each of these steps is dependent on a QA analyst, team leader and admin respectively — all combining their skills to cultivate stronger agents and, as a result, improved service for every single customer. Follow the tips explored above to build a streamlined, smooth coaching program for your business.
Do you have any of your own ideas about coaching and ways to make it most effective? Tell us below!
