5 Elements for Building a World-Class Agent Coaching Program
- 5. Agenda • What is agent coaching? • The problem with legacy quality monitoring • 5 principles for agent coaching • How AI can help • Q&A
- 6. Poll #1 What’s your main driver for agent coaching? • Customer experience • Customer escalations • Employee engagement • Adherence to policy • Handle time
- 7. What is agent coaching? A systematic feedback mechanism that uses customer interactions to deliver calibrated evaluations and improvement guidance
- 8. Effective coaching increases CSAT & lowers cost • Improve the customer experience • Reduce resolution time • Minimize escalations • Accelerate new agent onboarding • Help agents grow • Increase agent engagement
- 9. But it can be challenging Managers don’t have time Reviews are not aggregated Reviews are not standardized Reviews focus on negatives No regular review cadence Only a few cases are reviewed
- 10. Plus, the pandemic has changed support More remote work More online interactions Desire for meaningful work
- 11. 5 Agent Coaching Principles Create a meaningful rubric Give real-time feedback Review more cases Have the managers deliver the coaching Coach the managers
- 12. Create a meaningful rubric • Focus on outcomes – For the customer – For the organization • Build a rubric – With good/better/best criteria • Define how to handle difficult customers ●○○○○
- 13. Give near real-time feedback • Support agents cannot remember old cases • Deliver the coaching within days • Automation can help ○●○○○
- 14. Review more cases • Reviewing too few cases leads to biased evaluations • An automated tool can help conduct reviews with less effort ○○●○○
- 15. Have the managers deliver the coaching • Align the feedback with the needs of the organization • Use automation to help managers prepare ○○○●○
- 16. Coach the managers • Highlight achievements • Focus on a few issues • Help the agents work with difficult customers • Adopt a calibration mechanism ○○○○●
- 17. Agenda • What is agent coaching? • The problem with legacy quality monitoring • 5 principles for agent coaching • How AI can help • Q&A
- 18. Poll #2 How are do doing with agent coaching right now? • We don’t do anything • We do it ad-hoc • We have a formal process that’s completely manual • We have a formal process and a tool • We have a formal process and an AI-powered tool
- 19. Artificial Intelligence Today ● Machine Learning can find the needles in a huge haystack of data ● Most models are trained from a set of known data or responses ● When used the right way, AI can be a force multiplier
- 20. How AI Detects Coachable Moments • Identify bias-free signals across all cases • Highlight them to managers and support agents • Focus energy on areas that need attention • Empower a coaching conversation with real examples
- 21. AI can help with the 5 principles
- 22. Rubric Support ● Every organization needs a consistent rubric along which all agents are evaluated and coached ● Leverage rubric to train an AI model then automatically score communications ● Target coaching to the agents who need it the most based on rubric scores ●○○○○
- 23. Give real-time feedback • Coaching tied to real actions yields the best results • Leverage NLP and AI tools to identify customer sentiment and find opportunities to coach • Provide coaching while the case is in progress before it results in a poor customer experience ○●○○○
- 24. Review more all cases • Use natural language processing to read every customer interaction • Leverage signal extraction and machine learning to find the areas to coach • Machine learning model can recommend the most interesting cases based on signals ○○●○○
- 25. Empower managers to coach ● Give managers time to coach by removing time consuming call reviews ● Use AI signals and the rubric to highlight coaching areas ● Set goals and leverage AI to monitor progress Customer Skills Process Troubleshooting ○○○●○
- 26. Coach the managers ● Remove scoring bias using AI to apply consistent approach ● Compare scores across teams, managers, and organization wide. ● Leverage decision trees to create automated coaching models for managers and agents (Image Source - www.craiyon.com) ○○○○●