Quality assurance is a significant component of delivering effective customer service. Professional coaching plays a key role in helping to ensure that best practices are adopted and quality is maintained. It also helps to set agents and teams up for success by offering support and preparing them to handle various types of situations. In this article, we take a look at how coaching can directly impact quality assurance.
Best Practices for Coaching and Feedback
To help ensure agent satisfaction and to build a strong and motivated team, it is important to follow some best practices in your coaching and when giving feedback. Here are some points to consider:
- Offer detailed feedback so that agents will know specifically where they can improve and how the improvements will be measured.
- Be positive when giving feedback and focus on issues that the agent can proactively solve.
- Focus on training and coaching employees who have lower than expected performance in order to get them on the same level as the rest of the team.
- Balance giving constructive feedback with also mentioning what the agent is doing well.
- Discuss a plan of action for areas where changes need to be made.
To help maintain agent satisfaction and to ensure that agents can fully have their voices heard about issues, allow them to challenge assessments. If giving written feedback, you can even include a section for this on the form.
Supplementing Your Coaching
Coaching needs to be consistent to be as effective as possible. But face-to-face or video coaching may not always be possible. So you can supplement these methods of coaching with online materials to give guidance and feedback to agents. It is also important to provide consistent training to keep the skills of agents up to date. You can even create a game to help with this. In his article regarding call center quality assurance best practices, Matheus Guimarães describes a game that was created:
“The Knowledge Game, where you create questions and answers linked to a specific item in the call center quality assurance monitoring scorecard and whenever your agent misses that specific item, the questions will appear to him, to create a learning routine in your operation. This way you can do it continuously and without taking people out of your service stations, avoiding the loss of performance in the operation.”
Identify Areas for Coaching
Monitor contact center activities to identify areas where coaching is needed. This can help to improve efficiency and customer service, such as increasing first call resolution. Here are some key points to consider:
- Monitor calls to identify areas where interactions are going well, and areas where service can be improved and coaching could be helpful.
- Use effective call and screen recording software for quality assurance for monitoring and coaching agents.
- Examine calls where customers are calling to get more information about an issue, and calls that involve high-value customers.
- Use automation tools and machine learning to score calls, gather data, and identify areas for improvement, performance management, coaching, and creating new programs.
As the tools for identifying and improving areas for quality assurance continue to evolve and become more efficient, quality management, coaching, and customer satisfaction will also be enhanced.
CH Consulting Group provides unparalleled expertise in the Contact Center and Customer Experience (CX) verticals. We have a nationwide team of industry veterans that can assist you to achieve exponential growth, manage change, and generate profit. For a comprehensive CX assessment and strategic plan customized for your unique business needs, connect with us here today.
