7 Important Call Center Skills Every Agent Should Have
Call center representatives must go above and beyond customer expectations to ensure satisfaction. Learn what call center skills are crucial for a gre...
In light of The Great Resignation, it is more important than ever for call centers to retain talent and create positive workplace cultures.
The recent rise in agent turnover has forced businesses to reevaluate their coaching and training techniques. By positioning agents for success, managers can keep agents engaged in their work and help them feel like valued members of the company. In turn, improved coaching, and training ensures agents can deliver quality customer experiences and improve your business’s bottom line.
In the past, call center managers have employed a one-size-fits-all approach to coaching and training; however, a personalized approach enables growth at the individual level and can be tailored to each agents’ specific strengths and weaknesses. This process begins with the utilization of the right technology solutions, such as AI-powered conversation intelligence technology. By capturing and analyzing 100% of customer interactions, call center managers can:
- Cross-pollinate best practices from high performers
- Identify and coach to specific development needs
- Determine real-time interventions to help agents succeed
Read on to learn our five proven coaching strategies to improve contact center culture and productivity.
Strategy 1: Align quality assurance and performance KPIs with coaching
Establishing key-performance-indicators, or KPIs, can serve as a starting point for a formal coaching program. AI technology helps facilitate this development by delivering the insights needed to align both performance and coaching benchmarks.
Strategy 2: Combine relevant datasets to drive customer understanding
Examining multiple data sources across your organization and analyzing them at scale can drive deeper understanding of your customers’ behaviors, wants and needs. Combining qualitative and quantitative data yields novel insights for improving your coaching methodology. For example, many organizations combine contact drivers with customer journey mapping, satisfaction, and retention metrics.
Strategy 3: Rely on positive reinforcement
A major part of coaching is cross-pollinating agents’ positive behaviors and best practices with the entire team. Celebrating accomplishments can help your agents feel more validated and successful in their roles.
Strategy 4: Deliver real-time feedback
By delivering timely "nudges" to your agents, technology can help them navigate difficult situations and avoid unnecessary escalations. Supervisors and managers can use alerts to understand daily and weekly team performance trends and identify coaching opportunities.
Strategy 5: Infuse empathy in customer interactions
Your organization can use AI-driven analysis to understand specific customer emotions and coach agents to respond accordingly. Emotional insights help identify indicators of loyalty or churn-likely behavior.
Want to learn how to adopt a data-driven approach to coaching and training in the contact center? Download our whitepaper The Data-Driven Supervisor's Handbook for more information.
