10 Expert Tips for Call Centre Coaching

Effective call centre coaching is a cornerstone of building high-performing teams and delivering exceptional customer service.

However, achieving this involves the thoughtful application of strategies that inspire, empower, and motivate agents to develop the right skills and behaviours, rather than just routine training sessions.

To find out more, we asked industry experts Justin Robbins, Natalie Calvert, Rob Clarke, Dan Moross, Sarah Morgan, Daniel Ord, Kim Ellis, Jason Griffin, Nerys Corfield, and Katie Stabler, for their favourite advice for better using call centre coaching.

Video: 10 Experts Share Their Favourite Advice on Call Centre Coaching

Part One – Expert Advice on Call Centre Coaching

Watch the video below to hear Justin, Natalie, Rob, Dan and Sarah share their top call centre coaching advice:

With thanks to the following people for contributing to this video:

• Justin Robbins
• Natalie Calvert, CX High Performance
• Rob Clarke, Co-Founding Partner – Elev-8 Performance
• Dan Moross, MOO
• Sarah Morgan, Luceat Coaching

Part Two – Expert Advice on Call Centre Coaching

Watch the video below to hear Daniel, Kim, Jason, Nerys, and Katie share their top call centre coaching advice:

With thanks to the following people for contributing to this video:

• Daniel Ord, OmniTouch International
• Kim Ellis, Go Ginger
• Jason Griffin, EMEA Principal Solution Consultant at Five9
• Nerys Corfield, Injection Consulting
• Katie Stabler, CULTIVATE Customer Experience by Design

10 Expert Tips for Call Centre Coaching

Whether you’re an experienced coach or new to the role, the ten pieces of advice from the experts will help you drive better performance, improve agent satisfaction, and, ultimately, achieve better outcomes for your customers:

1. Coach to Drive Behaviours

The number one problem that I hear when I speak to coaches is that they feel like they are not driving long-term performance.

These coaches feel like what they have coached on has been lost or forgotten by the time of their next one-to-one session or interaction.

When I look into that, so often I find that the root cause is coaching to a score and not driving a behaviour.

Look at quality programmes. Many quality conversations will analyse whether the advisor was within an acceptable “range” or whether they were hitting a score of 85% or above, for example.

Yet, the score is completely irrelevant if we don’t focus on the behaviours that are driving that score.

So, focus on coaching in one or two behaviours at a time and not the achievement of a score.

Contributed by: Justin Robbins

2. Coach Your Coaches

Train your coaches to be better than your teams who are talking to customers. You don’t want your coaches sitting there having general conversations that are all about asking questions like: “What do you think would be the best way of doing it?”

Instead, you should actually be showing people how.

While it’s is sometimes good to ask open questions like the above, it is important that your coaches know the answers.

I’m meeting lots of coaches who are coaching qualified but, when it comes to having great, purposeful and deliverable conversations with customers, there’s a job to be done.

Contributed by: Natalie Calvert

3. Understand What Good Looks Like

When coaching, it is really important to understand what good looks like and be ready to demonstrate that.

There is a big difference between “Do as I tell you” and “Watch me have a go and then we will review it together”.

Then, as a very specific call centre tip that follows on from that, think about “shrinking the change”.

Rather than having a list of ten or fifteen things to go through, work out what small change will have the biggest difference, pick that one thing and focus on it because it will provide a better outcome than trying to do the ten at once.

Contributed by: Rob Clarke

Listen to Rob talk more about coaching advisors in the following episode of The Contact Centre Podcast, where we and Rob’s colleague Lee Jones discuss how best to deal with challenging customers.

For more information on this podcast visit Podcast – Dealing With Challenging Customers

4. Focus on Strength Spotting

With all performance management, call centre coaching included, it too often focuses on people’s weaknesses and trying to fix areas where they are not strong.

This approach is sometimes the opposite of the approach that you should be taking.

Often, finding what people are really good at, homing in on that and focusing on how you can harness their strengths, not just improve a weakness, can be a really good idea.

In many cases, when someone has a weakness, it is very hard for them to develop that into a strength.

Instead, focus on how you can improve by making better use of your people’s strengths.

Contributed by: Dan Moross

5. Guard Against Defensiveness

It is really important to ensure that coaching is something that is seen as being collaborative and really supportive.

Ensure that there is no defensiveness from your advisors at all and that they understand that coaching is there purely to support them and help them to develop.

When you have got really strong teams, where there is a lot of trust, another element that can help is adding some peer review and peer coaching.

Having this in place can be really empowering and impactful, where advisors can learn from colleagues and better identify their own strengths and weaknesses.

Contributed by: Sarah Morgan

6. Be Wary of Personal Opinions

Be very careful of your personal opinion. I find that a lot of coaches bring in their personal opinions, telling advisors, “I think you should do this/that…”

This approach is a little risky because you are representing an organization and its brand, so I say to coaches that they have to leave their personal opinions at the door.

After all, personal opinions can confuse people.

The biggest gift that you can give to the team that you can coach is clarity.

Contributed by: Daniel Ord

7. Create Acronyms

Task your advisors with coming up with an acronym for customer service. They will then go away and really break down:

• What is “great customer service”?
• What do I want our customers to say about our customer service?
• How do I want our customers to feel?

This is a really great activity to do in a Zoom or a Microsoft Teams meeting.

Send your advisors off into break rooms, come back and ask them: what have you come up with?

Contributed by: Kim Ellis

8. Plot Out a Reward Scheme

Learning isn’t easy, but having a tangible incentive for the advisor to strive towards will increase their desire to learn.

Now, I don’t think that many people will be surprised to learn that the reward that advisors would most like to have is time off the phone, but you can build a wider structure to say that if advisors hit certain coaching targets, then they will get a reward from it.

It’s all about creating a coaching programme that is personalized to individual advisors and also adding rewards for applying your key coaching principles.

Contributed by: Jason Griffin

For more on creating a great contact centre reward scheme, read our article: How to Improve Your Employee Reward Schemes – With Examples

9. Invest in Your Coaches

I was on the board of a contact centre for about three years that had a true coaching culture. It was a really enlightening experience as to the value of having qualified coaches.

From team leaders up, everyone was coached from between Level 3 and Level 7 in contact centre coaching.

So, my top tip is to understand the value it would bring to your organization to invest in having some qualified coaches, if you haven’t already.

Contributed by: Nerys Corfield

10. Coach in a Customer Focus

Ensuring that the wider customer experience is always part of the conversation, at every level, is important when having coaching conversations.

Support your leaders to drive customer-centricity and coach contact centre staff to embody a true customer focus.

Using customer-focused, interdepartmental key performance indicators (KPIs) will support operational performance in a wealth of ways.

Contributed by: Katie Stabler

For lots more advice from our ten experts, check out the following video articles:

• 10 Experts Share Their Favourite Advice for Remote Working
• 10 Experts Share Their Favourite Advice on Call Centre Metrics
• 10 Experts Share Their Favourite Advice on Employee Engagement

Author: Robyn Coppell
Reviewed by: Rachael Trickey