What is Performance Coaching?
Gartner defines Performance Coaching and Management as the combination of methodologies and metrics that enable users to define, monitor and optimize outcomes necessary to achieve organizational goals and objectives.
Productive performance coaching is built on three key pillars, and we can pull those from Gartner’s definition above: insights, quality conversations and forward looking. Using key metrics managers can better understand the needs of their employees and have candid two-way conversation, encouraging regular, direct and supportive feedback of progress.
Successful organizations strive to create an environment where the individual takes responsibility for their own skills, behaviors and contributions. Effective performance coaching is about introducing a culture where everyone wins—because the key focus is on shared learning and continuous improvement. It is so much more than quarterly objective-setting and traditional annual reviews. This leads to future success of the employee and organization.
Performance Coaching for a New Era
In the contact center, performance coaching are routine parts of the process, yet managers still encounter major barriers. They often lack sufficient time to analyze and use data from multiple sources, and struggle with clunky IT systems or a lack of staff training to maximize the latest advancements in technology (such as artificial intelligence [AI] and analytics).
As customer expectations continue to rise and flexible working becomes more accepted, contact center leaders must reassess their Quality Assurance (QA) processes. They can start by looking at performance coaching solutions designed to improve staff engagement and measure performance across the team.
This guide shows how to set new standards in contact center performance coaching. Discover what makes a good performance coaching solution and learn how to introduce a complete coaching and performance management cycle that drives agent improvement, ensures consistent service levels and delivers stand-out customer experiences.
Re-energize Performance Coaching
Develop meaningful KPIs
Make the most of intuitive and personalized dashboards
Don’t forget gamification.
Let the data drive instruction.
6 Essential ‘Must-haves’
Data-optimized solutions that offer a complete picture of performance coaching. The most effective options effortlessly collate information about 100% of customer and agent interactions into a unified view – from transcripts, sentiment analyses, contact information and screen recordings to the evaluation forms themselves. Integrated tech seamlessly connects key data streams from across the entire organization – including CRM, ERP, HR – to produce multi-dimensional KPIs and reports.
Omni-channel capabilities, including text and speech-to-text analytics, pull together phone, email, text, chat and social media into a single view of customer interactions to boost agent performance.
Organization-wide business intelligence, which aggregates, organizes and analyzes data from any source in the organization, can help create a comprehensive and balanced scorecard of performance.
Real-time insights, powered by embedded analytics solutions, deliver KPIs and relevant insights in real time instead of static calculations that lag a day behind.
Customizable dashboards give agents, supervisors and managers a complete view of the information most relevant to their jobs, including gamification and leader boards.
Clear reports and visualizations, using plain language, make KPIs and reports easier for everyone to understand.
Work with a partner not a vendor
Vendors sell. Partners support. The difference isn’t just service – it’s the whole approach to service. A true partner aligns with the success of the customer, providing expert guidance, consultation, and professional services without a premium price tag.
Investing in a cloud-first partner that offers remote flexibility, scalability, increased innovation and a continuous cycle of new feature releases can allow an organization to collaborate and promote productive employee development. Here are factors to look for when assessing a solution partner:
- Do they have a dedicated online user community portal, allowing customers to submit ideas, vote on and discuss development prioritization?
- Do they provide free apps for customers faced with immediate needs, such as a sudden shift to remote needs?
- Do they provide practical advice on security for at-home agents and other ‘how to‘ guides online?
The best partners keep momentum going even when traditional networking events like customer conferences are distant memories. They continue to engage and motivate, wherever their customers are.
10-point Checklist for Implementing Performance Coaching
You don’t want to retrofit a performance coaching solution after implementing it. First, create a structure for contact center training – both induction and continuous – to help find the right solution. What type of metrics will you use to track agent progress and assess the key customer satisfaction and business drivers to create quality scorecards? Then, consider which types of training/online learning techniques you need to achieve positive business and customer outcomes.
Avoid a random, hit and miss approach. Aim to filter contacts through ticket type, status, and close date so that you can evaluate calls with the most valuable insights.
For example, by filtering calls by longest handling time, you may be able to spot broken processes, knowledge gaps and key training priorities. Also make sure to setup your performance coaching solution with a filtering function to track specific metrics that you wish to target.
It can be tricky to ensure consistent and fair evaluations, especially in large contact centers with multiple people analyzing calls. The best performance coaching solutions include a calibration feature that makes it easy to compare analyst responses.
Sometimes agents will disagree with a quality score, and blindly accepting that negative score without challenge can grow resentment. Offering the ability to challenge via a simple button-click allows frontline staff to express their own perspective on performance scores, while helping set better expectations and unearthing new coaching opportunities.
A good performance coaching system allows managers to create proactive training modules developed to engage all skill sets. Aim to include videos, quizzes and leader boards and make sure the performance coaching solution can accommodate a variety of training materials and techniques.
When done properly, gamification is a real game-changer for staff engagement, motivation, and training. Even better, when paired with incentives from an online store, a gamified solution allows agents to trade the points that they earn for company gear, donations, or other benefits.
Introduce alerts to proactively send agents feedback and better engage them with their performance. Through these alerts, leaders can also be made aware of regulatory, compliance and adherence problems, allowing them to better manage their teams and safeguard performance.
Contact centers typically generate performance data in several different systems. However, pulling and analyzing all this data manually is time-consuming and inefficient. Consider how a performance coaching solution would integrate with your existing contact center technology.
The key to great performance in one channel is different from another. An ideal performance coaching solution gives contact centers the chance to score differently across each channel, a solution that pulls together phone, email, text, chat and social media into a single view of customer interactions. Having one single viewpoint, agents don’t have to switch between multiple screens and that increases their overall performance.
Introducing Calabrio ONE
Calabrio ONE enables an intelligent, analytics-fueled approach to enterprise performance coaching cycles. Calabrio Performance Coaching, available starting January 2022, is part of Calabrio ONE – the all-in-one Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) suite that revolutionizes the way enterprises engage their employees as well as their customers. Calabrio ONE combines call recording, quality management, workforce management, multichannel voice-of-the-customer analytics with Data Management on a single, integrated platform:
Interaction recording
Quality Management
Workforce Management
Analytics
