A common mistake we see in contact centres is coaching being confused with training. Often when team leaders are told they need to train their teams about managing compliance, they try to fit it into their regular behavioural coaching sessions, thinking coaching is the same thing as training. But coaching is NOT training. Coaching looks at behaviours. Training looks at processes and systems. Compliance requires the latter. The good news is that YakTrak can help do both these things.

But first, let’s take a step back.

What is compliance and why do contact centres need compliance management?

Compliance means operating safely within the regulatory system of your organisation and industry. Compliance is part of enterprise risk management and includes the following types of risks:

• Conduct
• Environmental
• EHS (environmental health and safety, also known as workplace health and safety)
• Product quality
• Financial
• Technology

Organisations in highly regulated industries (such as finance, banking, insurance, energy, superannuation, aged care, telecommunications, health and government) often have higher compliance requirements. These are also industries that are likely to have staff working in call centres. This means that managing compliance is often a pain point for call centres, but it doesn’t have to be. YakTrak can help you manage compliance with a dedicated compliance management system.

YakTrak minimises the danger of compliance breaches by supporting a culture of continual learning and training. YakTrak’s system offers:

• End to end observation of performance and development
• The ability for compliance team members to observe staff interactions with customers and report outcomes in YakTrak
• Customised workflows that can be mapped to compliance processes
• A central repository to record all training and documentation

This helps to monitor and report on the regulatory-based interactions that team members have every day. It also allows you to observe patterns of behaviour and identify trends before they become problems. And when something does go wrong, YakTrak provides audit trails for regulators and makes it easy to track remediation of compliance breaches.

So, why can’t I manage compliance through my team’s coaching sessions?

We get it – time with your team members off the floor is limited. You’re being asked to train your team on compliance management, and you’ve already got coaching sessions booked with your team members. So why not include compliance management in your coaching sessions, right?

The problem is that coaching and training are different. The purpose of coaching is to develop a team member’s skills by teaching them the right behaviours to develop those skills. In a coaching session, you should be focussed on giving your team member a few new behaviours to work on to do their job better.

But compliance development is a bit different. Compliance is system-based and process-based. It’s about knowing the do’s and don’ts of your organisation’s systems and processes and any related regulatory frameworks. This kind of learning requires a different type of interaction – training.

Training is typically done in a group setting, focussed on knowledge transfer and structured, synchronous learning. Coaching is individualised, usually done in a 1-to-1 setting and focusses on practicing skills and behaviours required on the job. Training teaches people how to do things properly, according to the process or structure. Coaching teaches people how to develop their individual skills to deliver improved performance.

So how does YakTrak help?

YakTrak has a dedicated compliance management feature that can track the compliance management process, but the YakTrak ecosystem is also designed to drive regular coaching. It does this by helping leaders and team members set goals, schedule coaching sessions, maintain coaching cadence and tracking outcomes.

If you’re looking for a system that can help manage compliance, drive coaching and performance and keep track of all the systems and documentation behind it, consider YakTrak.

Find out more about YakTrak’s compliance management solution.

YakTrak’s final tip – the honourable mention

So you’re asking, “What am I supposed to do now?” You understand the importance of compliance management, you need to train your team on compliance, you want to maintain regular coaching sessions, and also make sure you don’t take team members off the floor for too long. How do you do it all?

While the preference should be to avoid mixing coaching and training (and yes, you’ll probably need to run some dedicated compliance training with your team), we do have one time-saving tip for you. We like to call it the ‘honourable mention’. While your coaching sessions should be 80% focussed on coaching, you can use the last few minutes of each session to discuss an honourable mention, which could be a compliance-based tip or trick to look out for. By taking a couple of minutes at the end of each session to point out compliance or process related gaps, over time you’ll build up a steady awareness of compliance requirements in your team.

Good luck!

Looking for more insights about employee coaching in contact centres?

Head to our Contact Centre Resources page, where we share insights about the challenge of retention in call and contact centres along with simple bite sized actions that you and your people can do now, so you can focus on the things that matter.

Want to find out how YakTrak can help?

Find out how YakTrak can support employee coaching and compliance management outcomes in your organisation: get in touch with us today.