Call Center Coaching: Elevate Customer Experience with Effective Training

Call center coaching could be one of the most valuable activities you can undertake in your organization. By investing in upskilling your call center agents, you’re essentially investing in your customers – and the payoff from a business perspective is massive. In this article, we’ll cover some basics around call center coaching, implementing an effective call center coaching strategy, and the importance of leveraging technology and gamification as part of that call center coaching strategy.  

What Is Call Center Coaching? 

Call center coaching is the process of improving call center agent performance by providing feedback and guidance to call center agents. Call center coaching can improve agents’ skills, knowledge, motivation, and engagement.  

The goal of call center coaching is to empower agents to perform at their best, and to deliver a consistent, high-quality customer experience. Typically, coaching sessions involve a supervisor or coach working with agents to identify areas of improvement, set goals, and develop strategies to achieve those goals. 

Today, there are tools and platforms that automate personalized coaching at scale, leveraging gamification platforms and mobile devices to provide a more effective, more fun call center coaching experience.  

The Importance of Coaching in Call Centers 

The importance of call center coaching cannot be overemphasized. If you want improved results, it follows that your agents must be coached and upskilled to be able to provide those results. What’s more, without call center coaching, agents can feel isolated, and engagement and retention rates can plummet.  

On the positive side, call center coaching can drive: 

• A high level of customer satisfaction and retention 
• Improvement in agents’ communication skills 
• The ability to handle difficult customers, and effectively resolve issues 
• Agent engagement, motivation, and retention 
• Attaining personal and team KPIs

Call center coaching also shows agents that you are willing to invest in them and in their career success and that you believe in empowering them to achieve the potential you saw when they were first hired.  

How to Implement an Effective Coaching Strategy In Your Call Center 

There are several recognized strategies to provide and enhance call center coaching. 

Role playing Here, employees are encouraged to engage in simulations where they are faced with different challenges, from problem solving to communication, dealing with difficult customers, or handling technical requests. 

Call monitoring For call monitoring, quality assurance managers listen to actual calls and provide coaching and feedback.   

1-on-1 feedback sessions In these sessions, managers can review analytics and metrics together with call center agents, and identify areas for improvement.   

While these are effective strategies, new technologies mean that there are more efficient – and more effective – ways of providing call center coaching.  

Leveraging Technology and Gamification for Call Center Coaching 

Modern platforms have combined the traditional elements of call center coaching with technology, to provide a coaching experience that’s orders of magnitude more effective and scalable than previous methods.  

For example, with leading call center coaching platforms like Centrical, call center agents can be empowered with gamified goals, personalized microlearning, and guided performance feedback. 

You can offer gamified goals that are tied to personalized microlearning, layered with continuous coaching that drives ongoing improvement. 

The benefits of such a platform are tremendous and include: 

• Rapid upskilling and improvement 
• Increased motivation and engagement 
• Drive cultural transformation 
• Accelerated time to proficiency 

Gamification elements are extremely powerful when it comes to call center coaching. For example, you can recognize and reward the right behaviors with badges and points, encourage learning through progressing game narratives and levels, and offer augmented coaching, social recognition, knowledge sharing, and continuous, AI-powered feedback.  

Watch the Centrical platform in action with a quick preview.  

Centrical Call Center Coaching Solution 

Centrical offers world-leading call center coaching through its unique AI-powered, continuous coaching platform. With Centrical, you can: 

Empower managers to thrive 

Poor managers have an outsized negative effect on your workforce, including driving up absenteeism and attrition rates. On the other hand, great managers encourage engagement, motivation, and productivity.  

Empower your managers by removing the administrative burden around coaching and giving them the tools that they need to coach effectively. Centrical uses augmented intelligence to achieve these goals, enabling frontline managers to connect at a deeper level, and leading their frontline teams to success.  

Implement seamless, continuous coaching 

Give managers everything they need for consistent coaching, including actionable scheduled conversations, coaching templates, integrated quality evaluation forms, targeted challenges, contextual learning, virtual conversations, and daily AI-driven insights to provide the right coaching for agents at just the right time. These insights help draw managers’ attention to performance outliers – with daily insights around significant changes in performance, and well-being indicators that can support empathetic leadership. 

Expand your coaching network 

It’s not only managers who can provide coaching. Centrical lets you scale your managers’ effectiveness by promoting and rewarding knowledge sharing to build a community of experts. 

Let data drive coaching 

Successful coaching is reliant on data and metrics to assess progress and create plans for success. The Centrical platform offers visibility into individual and team performances, as well as targeted microlearning, and clear career pathways that encourage ongoing development. 

Provide ongoing feedback 

With Centrical’s solution in place, managers can easily: 

• Start performance conversations around specific KPIs  
• Send a targeted coaching action to create a conversation around performance 
• Set a personal challenge  
• Assign personalized learning missions  

It’s no wonder Centrical clients experience a 60% reduction in call flow errors, an 8% drop in attrition, and a 7% jump in voice of customer scores. To see the Centrical platform for yourself, check out this preview.  

Call Center Coaching Takeaways 

Call center coaching is a key factor in hitting KPIs and affects almost every aspect of your business. By making improvements here, you’ll quickly see a multiplier effect at play. 

We looked at the importance of call center coaching, including the need for call center agents to feel that the company is investing in them. We analyzed how to implement an effective coaching strategy in your contact center, how to leverage technology – including AI and gamification techniques – to take call center coaching to the next level, and finally, how Centrical makes it easy for companies to implement call center coaching best practices with one advanced, end-to-end platform.  

To learn more about how you can benefit from Centrical’s solution, request your personalized demo today!