Interaction Analytics Boosts Coaching

Jeff Gallino discusses how interaction analytics can improve the coaching experience for supervisors and agents.

1. Small incremental improvements add up

Analytics makes it much easier for supervisors to raise the game of both individual agents and the whole team. Dave Brailsford, the British Olympic Cycling coach, famously converted his team into world champions by analysing where a series of 1% improvements could be made.

Interaction analytics can do this for call centre supervisors by providing access to analysis on every customer interaction every day.

2. Less time listening to calls, more time coaching

Typically, up to 50% of a supervisor’s time is used on coaching and listening to calls.

Implementing analytics solutions can free up that time by automating the coaching of particular transactions via the software so that the supervisor can focus on coaching specific behaviours instead.

It does this by providing the supervisor and each agent with automatic scorecards on all their customer interactions every day – so they can see where they need to improve.

3. Making informed decisions motivates agents

Because an analytics platform can monitor every call and interaction – and can identify areas of conformance or non-conformance automatically – supervisors no longer need to spend time hunting for individual calls or listening to random calls.

Not only does this free up a lot of time but it also means that supervisors can make decisions based on all interactions and not just a random selection of interactions. This is potentially more accurate, fairer and more motivational for agents because they can see that coaching is based on their whole performance and not a one-off call.

4. Visibility of performance drives improvement

Providing supervisors and agents with complete visibility of their performance is the foundation for improvement. Giving agents access to their own scorecard enables them to spend the first 5-10 minutes at the beginning of their shift reviewing the last shift’s entire transaction series.

This enables them to see where they need to improve – from a proper greeting to showing more empathy or being more polite – and then to check mid-shift if they are making the necessary improvement.

In addition to being able to see their own score, agents can also be told how they performed relative to their peers, e.g. that they were the #3 best performer. Although they won’t know which agents were better than them, this additional insight adds competitive encouragement to improve the customer experience.

For supervisors, this means that they don’t need to spend hours listening to a small number of calls but can see the analysis for every interaction – by agent and aggregated for the team. This provides the insight – and the time – to target coaching where it will deliver the greatest value.

With thanks to Jeff Gallino at CallMiner