It’s the nature of call centers that entry-level people often come and go quickly. So how do you maintain high service standards in this unstable environment?

With ongoing and consistent coaching, said Anne Ivey, contact center practice manager with Omega Performance Corp., in a BAI Call Center Forum session entitled “Call Center Personnel: Creating Customer Delight Through High Impact Coaching.”

“Even if you haven’t hired the best of the best, effective coaching impacts the conversation with the customer,” she said.

Underscoring the importance of this, Ivey cited survey data from a Kelly Services and Purdue University study showing that 92% of customers form their image of a company based on their experience using the call center. Further, 63% will stop using a company’s products or services based on a negative call center experience.

There are right ways and wrong ways to coach, however. The wrong way is lecturing call center agents on what they did wrong, Ivey said. Better is having a dialog between the agent and the coach in which the agent helps identify her own strengths and weaknesses. “If you’re doing all the talking, employees don’t feel like they have any skin in the game,” Ivey said.

Ivey recommended a four-step coaching process that begins with agreement on an agenda and is followed by asking the agent to talk about what went well in a particular call, what could be done differently next time and then agreeing on an action plan. Unlike the typical off-site training program, this coaching is done in the workplace and draws upon immediate observations of an employee’s work.

With effective coaching, the process is as critical as the ideas that are shared, including the agent’s full participation in the conversation. For example, it’s insufficient for members of a quality assurance team to listen in on calls and simply turn over to the agent a written report about how it was handled. That does little to engage the agent and even less to make the agents feel good about where they work.

Scheduling coaching sessions, rather than leaving them to chance, is essential. In an ideal world, team leaders would spend as much as 60% of their time coaching agents, Ivey said, adding that this is rarely practical. Ivey recommends at least one hour with each agent per month.

It is also critical that team leaders get training and coaching themselves in the art of coaching.

Effective coaching comprises a wide gamut of best practices, Ivey said, including use of many forms of communication, including face-to-face contact, e-mail, voice mail and hand-written notes. In addition, it’s important for team leaders to know their audience and to speak accordingly.

For baby boomers, now between 41 and 59 years old, comments about how their work connects to the company’s performance resonates well, Ivey said. But generation Xers, born between 1965 and 1975, are more likely to respond to talk about how their performance affects their opportunities with the company.

More Articles in This Issue

» INTERCHANGE FEE BATTLE: TIME TO STEP BACK?
Is it time to take the fight over interchange fees out of the courts before it does real harm to the credit card associations and their member banks? »more

» ALL ABOARD FOR DIGITAL ONBOARDING
Digital onboarding tools, once reserved mainly for the largest banks, are becoming popular with financial institutions of all sizes, helping to drive online banking and bill payment and the cross selling of other financial products, said Paul Murphy, president of Murphy & Co. in a Monday morning workshop entitled "A Fresh Idea to Drive Internet Banking and Bill Pay Usage: Digital Onboarding." »more

» BANKERS VISIT THE MAGIC KINGDOM
While the average banker may not be ready to don mouse ears, there's still an awful lot he or she could learn from the Walt Disney Co., said Bob Spina, a program facilitator at the Disney Institute, the company's business training school. »more

» BAI Home
» BAI Banking Strategies Online
   To subscribe/renew
   Articles archives
   To advertise
» BAI Conferences & Events
» BAI Education & Training
» BAI Research & Benchmarking
» Resource Directory