High customer expectations, complex customer interactions and high staff turnover are common factors facing contact centres. Finding the right people and training them so they are engaged and motivated to keep providing the service you expect can be challenging. Here we look at how contact centre coaching with YakTrak can help.

Structured training and development that takes place online or in a classroom generally emphasises frameworks, processes and procedures that your staff need to know about. It’s essential stuff that will help you train your contact centre agents in what they need to know about your business and its customers.

On-the-job coaching provides a hands-on approach tailored to each employee and focuses on real-time issues and the immediate application of new skills or behaviours. This means it is highly individualised to an employee’s specific strengths and capability gaps. It means you can make a difference to performance improvement where it matters most – on the job!

Formal training is needed and has a role, but employee coaching can make a sustainable ongoing difference when it’s integrated into the daily work of your people. While it might seem like it can take time away from leaders’ other work, not coaching is, in fact, costing you dearly.

YakTrak embeds coaching into the daily experience of your workforce, ensuring that it can develop specific, role-based skills and continuously improve.

Whether you want to use coaching to improve the customer experience and raise customer satisfaction, or improve quality management and address skills gaps, targeted coaching from contact centre managers and team leaders will make a genuine difference. Let’s look at the steps that should be a part of every coaching program.

1.  Set goals

Without a focus on goal, coaching becomes a nice chat. Your agents will walk away unsure of what’s expected of them and what they should be focusing on.

Set goals that are based on capability gaps and the employee’s development goals and make them SMART. Focus on actions and behaviours the agent can practise and incorporate into their daily work; for example:

• ‘Ask three different open questions with customers each day this week.’
• ‘Use the updated call script seven times today.’
• ‘Identify customer needs and introduce them to a relevant additional product or service three times this week.’

YakTrak is designed to help you set, track and meet goals. Leaders gain visibility over team member goals on their dashboard while team members can see how they’re tracking. YakTrak helps team members take ownership of their own goals.

Using YakTrak to set and monitor goals on a day-to-day basis will help you embed a coaching culture that can make a real difference.

2. Focus on behaviours

You’re probably focused on your performance metrics but to effectively coach and hit those performance targets you’ll need to consider what drives those outputs. It’s the behaviours (inputs) that your people practise that will help you increase profit, reduce average handle time (AHT) and improve the customer experience.

Employee coaching can make an enormous difference by showing team members what they can do to get the results you are seeking.

Here are some tips that can help you to focus on the behaviours that drive agent performance:

• Work out specific behaviours that will drive the change you want to see. Use call flow frameworks created for your company to identify the behaviours you want to see (and don’t make up your own!) and ensure the behaviours link to relevant skills and competency frameworks.
• Focus on one behaviour at a time – this will help your agent make the changes they need to make and ensure that you can both see what the one behavioural shift means.
• Use your coaching time to talk about the inputs (behaviour) and keep focused on the behaviours for as long as it takes to drive the change.
• Provide tailored feedback to your agent.

3. Track progress in coaching sessions

Use your coaching conversations to keep the goal in focus. Providing feedback is critical. Remember, you’re focusing on behaviours, so questions to consider include:

• Are they demonstrating the new behaviour?
• Are they demonstrating the behaviour consistently?
• Is the new behaviour having a positive impact on the desired output?

Using YakTrak to set and monitor goals on a day-to-day basis drives performance by keeping the focus on the daily actions and behaviours your contact centre agents can take to make a real change.

When coaching agents, remember to keep track of progress in coaching meetings and make a note of every time the input drives the result you’re looking for. Using YakTrak to track your employee coaching success will help to drive sustainable results.

4. Set an operating rhythm

YakTrak helps you set up a rhythm for on-the-job agent coaching – inspiring people to keep improving.

Establishing regular coaching sessions – daily or weekly – helps to embed a performance and coaching culture. It also keeps people focused on the behaviours they need to practise and demonstrate.

5. Ask your contact centre agent to take the notes

If you see your team member taking notes, it lets you know that they are also taking their professional development seriously and they value the time you are taking to coach them.

6. Keep it together in YakTrak

Keeping all your information together is as important as taking notes in the first place.

Using a central system like YakTrak allows contact centre team leaders and team members to record all coaching notes, goals and feedback in one place. It can be easily accessed by everyone. YakTrak also has a handy voice-to-text feature making it easy to quickly add notes on the go, plus two people can make notes into the system at the same time.

Remember to refer to the previous notes at the start of each coaching session. It sends a clear message that you take follow-up seriously. Your team member will come to expect that in each coaching session, you’ll open up YakTrak, review the previous notes and ask questions about their progress since the last coaching session.

7. Celebrate success

By using YakTrak to keep track of the shifts you’re seeing, you’ll have documented reasons to acknowledge your team members’ wins. Once a team member has celebrated their success in achieving their first win, you start the coaching process again, and can move onto the next goal.