Table of contents
- What does a good coaching session look like?
- What role does speech analytics play in call center training?
- Always provide specific examples during training sessions
- Use sentiment analysis for “temperature checks”
- Tailor each coaching session to agent skill level and development needs
- Automated scorecards foster objectivity
- Set goals incremental, achievable goals
Every agent has the potential to be your best contact center agent. As a manager and coach, it’s your job to bring out the greatest potential in your agents. But, coaching your agents isn’t always easy.
A successful coaching session starts with knowledge. Data collected from calls gives you the power to create an objective and personal coaching session. This one-on-one guidance helps you mold agents to be the best they can be.
Tools that drill down into details of each call help you effectively coach and improve the performance of your agents.
So, just how can you coach your best contact center agents?
What does a good coaching session look like?
A good coaching session builds trust and helps your agents develop skills. You can create a learning environment that does just that by tying performance back to data.
To build trust you can:
- Use constructive language
- Make it personal
Making sure your agents develop new skills you can:
- Provide specific examples
- Role play
- Coach in real time
- Point out positives as well as negatives
Creating a learning environment that is objective and the lessons pointed might seem like a fine line to walk. The good news is that speech analytics can help your coaching efforts in almost every scenario.
What role does speech analytics play in call center training?
Speech analytics help you develop a better understanding of the processes in your contact center. Thanks to advances in the field it has the ability to drill down deeper into conversations. Better conversation transcription, sentiment analysis, real-time analysis, and collaboration with artificial intelligence (AI) make it an indispensable tool.
Speech analytics gives you the ability to provide objective, personalized, and productive training sessions. It’s the perfect tool to coach your best contact center agents.
Always provide specific examples during training sessions
Specific examples solidify your feedback and make for a more objective training session. Being able to point to specific instances of what needs improvement will help you make your coaching clear and personal.
Speech analytics allows you to pull from practically any conversation your agents have had with your customers. In your lessons you can utilize:
- Conversations specific to the agent you are coaching
- Conversations that demonstrate the skill you are teaching
- Conversations that demonstrate what not to do.
It is important to remember that reinforcing positive behaviors can be just as effective as dissuading negative ones.
Use sentiment analysis for “temperature checks”
Emotional intelligence is a soft skill most effectively acquired through practice. With the help of AI, speech analytics can perform sentiment analysis on each conversation.
Your coaching sessions get a boost when you can highlight points in the conversation that are examples of how to practice:
- Active listening
- Empathy
- Context
Practicing soft skills is easier than ever with real-time coaching. You can use speech analytics to assess sentiment and coach your agents as each call happens. Screen pops can prompt your agents to:
- pause and repeat your customers’ questions (active listening)
- acknowledge your customers’ situation (empathy)
- find meaning in their words (context)
Speech analytics can also add a realistic element to role-playing. Using actual conversations as the basis for these exercises, your agents can practice empathy. Acting on the other end of the conversation they gain perspective into what your customers experience. It can also help them in determining context in future conversations.
Tailor each coaching session to agent skill level and development needs
Coaching your agents is by no means one size fits all. If your coaching approach is the same for each agent, you might end up working on skills they already have. Worse, you could miss opportunities to teach skills they lack.
Speech analytics allow you to tease out the nitty-gritty details of skills that need improvement. Training sessions can address each of their personal shortcomings. Agents that are made to sit through training sessions that teach them skills they have already mastered lose interest and stagnate. Personalized coaching sessions keep your agents focused and eager to make improvements to their performances.
Automated scorecards foster objectivity
Automated scorecards are another tool that helps you conduct an objective and successful coaching session. With the help of AI-enhanced speech analytics, you can pick out key phrases, words, and other indicators of performance. Agents receive scores based on their ability to use targeted language throughout a call.
Scorecards can be tailored to whatever skills agents might be working on. You can track improvement and find out what kind of contextual triggers make it difficult for agents to hit their marks.
Scorecards allow you to assign numbers to agents’ abilities with regard to compliance and quality.
Set goals incremental, achievable goals
It’s important that each coaching session ends with setting goals for the next time you meet. It provides meaning to coaching sessions and indicates you are invested in agents’ development.
If agents are working on high-level skills, determining whether or not agents meet their goals can be difficult.
Speech analytics lets us measure what was once hard to quantify. Sentiment analysis and automated scorecards paint a picture of how your agents progress.
The goals should also come with positive reinforcement. Screen pops can provide encouragement when your agents demonstrate behavior that shows they are working on improving the skills they need.
Continuous learning is essential for growth. Speech analytics gives you the tools you need to keep your agents interested and engaged in the learning process.
