How to Dominate the New Reality of Customer Expectations with Better Call Center Coaching

Here’s a truth that’s tough for many of us to swallow: Technology has not made it easier to deliver great customer experiences. At least, technology is not the silver bullet we were promised to create a turnkey business process for serving our customers.

Instead, we’re presented with jargon like “AI” and “real-time” while just the promise of technology has our customers demanding increasingly personalized and seamless omni-channel experiences with us. And data proves that when they don’t get it...they leave.

Today’s call centers face a huge variety of challenges and opportunities from global pandemics, hybrid workforce transitions, explosions of new technologies, and shifting regulatory requirements. To achieve stability and success in such an environment, we need to become strategic operations that can flex, adjust, and adapt. Gone are the days when running a call center was a cookie cutter proposition.

This is deep strategic development that won’t be accomplished with fancy analytics or a simple technology adoption. Our teams are the ones who will turn our call centers into forces for growth in our businesses, and so we must invest in our people as a key strategy for success.

Ironically, this is where technology can be exponentially impactful, albeit only as one piece of the larger puzzle. Most call center teams are woefully under enabled. But with better coaching and management, data shows that performance can increase across the board, unlocking millions in found revenue and lower costs.

Unfortunately right now, call center coaching is not an area of strategic focus in most organizations. The traditional coaching workflow is stupendously inefficient and fails to surface good opportunities for improvement or build focus and trust between coaches and reps. Similarly, call analytics platforms deliver high level insights and vanity metrics without deep context for what’s actually happening on most calls, and they don’t provide actionable ways to efficiently coach to better behavior across many calls. Neither of these approaches will measurably move the needle on call center performance.

However, when good technology - the kind built from contextual data - is combined with strong coaching strategy and workflow capability, it can make all the difference. This is the foundation of coaching enablement, and it’s something we’re passionate about here at VoiceOps.

Coaching enablement is the true potential of technology for call centers, in that it can help us realize the full potential of our teams. And it’s also the only way we will achieve the incredible experiences our customers demand and deserve from us, with the business results that follow.

To learn more about the weaknesses of traditional coaching programs, the steps to build a strong coaching strategy, and the elements of effective coaching technology, check out the eBook, “The New World of Call Center Coaching.”