Coaching in Call Centres
1. Team-leaders don’t know what to do beyond the basics
It’s true that most team-leaders are very proficient in coaching systems or product knowledge but often very weak in terms of skills based knowledge. Team-leaders are very good at taking induction trainees and giving them the basic skills but not so good at taking more experienced agents to the next level.
2. Team-leaders prefer to have time to be able to react to immediate requirements
You don’t me or Stephen Covey to remind you that effective people spending most of their time on things which are important and not urgent (or quadrant 2 in Covey’s theory on time management). For almost every call centre team leader, the most important quadrant 2 task is coaching.
3. Team-leaders are scared to coach
Many team-leaders sub-consciously believe that they are not as good as their agents and that this can be exposed during a coaching session.
4. Agents believe that they don’t like to be coached
In an environment full of KPI’s, SLA’s and constant measurement, some agents try anything to resist receiving coaching sessions. If an agent is performing, a team leader will bow to the pressure from the agent and not perform coaching. When the agent takes the inevitable dip in performance, the agent continues to resist the coaching. Coaching is like servicing your car. If you don’t do it on time, the car may work well for a time but when it breaks down, the car is often beyond repair. If you service the car, it will be more efficient and will stay with you longer!
5. Team Leaders have so much to do
If you spend time analysing what your team-leaders do, you will find a mixture of unimportant tasks being performed. I have known some team-leaders who fill their day by doing little more than compiling reports, sending emails and then imposing their management style by walking round the back of the desks of their staff and rarely giving any advice or guidance to their staff. This gives them the illusion of self-satisfaction at the end of the day after they have ticked items off their “to do list”. In their heads, they justify their lack of coaching by pointing to the lengthy list of actions they need to perform on a daily basis.
6. They don’t understand why coaching is important
Many team-leaders who don’t coach, weren’t coached themselves when they were working on the telephone. Imagine that you are a team-leader who was one of your most successful agents and received promotion despite rarely receiving coaching. You would undoubtedly believe that coaching is not important. When conducting coaching workshops with team-leaders, I am often amazed to find that they believe that coaching is one of the least most important items on their agenda.
7. QA do the coaching
This excuse barely warrants a response. How can team-leaders perform their job effectively without knowing everything about their staff? How can they know their staff without coaching?
Ineffective Coaching?
There is also a problem with the basics of coaching:
1. Team-leaders do not know the fundamentals
of coaching
Some of the skills of a good coach are
inherent in good leaders but just like taking your first golf
swing, the best way doesn’t always feel natural. They need to be
better at all aspects of the preparation, delivery and follow-up
of coaching sessions especially in the way communication is
delivered.
2. Each coaching session is stand-alone and
not part of an overall goal
Each subsequent coaching session must review
what has been done since the previous session. This helps focus
the agent in the target area(s) and is a great motivational tool
for both the agent and the team-leader when improvements have
been made.
3. Focussing exclusively on quick wins
Quick wins are often an important part of
any coaching session but the team-leader needs to think out of
the box to help the agent improve on more complex skills to
constantly improve their team and the enjoyment their agents
receive from their roles
4. The coaching process needs to be
constantly reviewed
A quality coaching system should not be
limited to ticking boxes on a pre-designed form. There are
literally dozens of different ways of conducting coaching. By
continually challenging the way coaching takes place, the whole
process is more enjoyable for the agent and the team-leader.
Oliver Thompson, of Transphorm is one of the UK’s leading
experts in coaching and he believes that coaching is so
effective as it draws on the candidates own knowledge, values
and beliefs to discover the solutions to move them forward.
Team-leaders often apply themselves in a very creative manner.
So many good ideas on things like improving scripts, improving
efficiency and call routing patterns come from team-leaders.
They need to use this creativity to come up with new and
innovative ideas to improve the quality of the coaching session
and more importantly the output it achieves.
5. Guiding Not Directing
Anyone with experience of children will know
that if they have an idea to do something (commonly, not what
you have in mind), they will think up their own way of achieving
it and will continue to apply themselves until they succeed.
They want to use the method they devised to complete the task
because it was THEIR idea. To put this into the context of
coaching call centre agents, team-leaders need to analyse the
way in which they communicate with their staff. Most agents know
most of the answers…they just need to know where to find those
answers.
Conclusion
Firstly, apologies to those call centres
where they truly do have a coaching culture but it is important
that we stress the importance of coaching. If you are
experiencing problems with attrition, productivity or even
unsatisfied customers or staff, the most important thing you can
do is to develop a culture of high quality coaching.
In addition, coaching can even replace much
classroom training particularly if you have an operation or
department that cannot support everyone being in training
together on the same day, or even that you do not have enough
people to fill a course tailored to your business.
Rob O’Malley is the author of this article.
He is The Chairman of The British Philippine Outsourcing Council
