Workforce Management Featured Article
How to Advance Your Brand Through Contact Center Coaching
Why are people spending so much time and money at Starbucks? Why do frequent flyers take off with Southwest again and again? And why do so many of my friends love Nordstrom?
It may be because they like coffee, need to get somewhere affordably, or just dig fancy shoes. But, it’s probably also in large part because of the unique customer experiences these companies deliver. And a big part of those experiences relates directly to the people these organizations have working for them.
Starbucks baristas are known for their perky personalities and efficient order taking and delivery. Southwest flight attendants try their best to make air travel fun. And Nordstrom has a great history of personalized customer service and providing an overall high-end customer experience.
All this doesn’t happen by accident.
These businesses have created a culture that emphasizes their own unique brands of customer service. And they’ve done that in large part by educating their employees and encouraging them to behave in certain ways to carry the company brands forward.
Contact center operations can and should do that too. They can do it by providing initial training; ongoing coaching; and a lift through encouragement and rewards such as competitive pay, the potential for bonuses, flexible schedules, team-building efforts, and more.
One thing contact centers will probably want to avoid, however, is simply scoring agents and sharing those scores with that. That’s the kind of thing that creates anger and anxiety, discourages employee engagement, and don’t offer much in the way of learning, notes Jeremy Watkin, director of customer experience at outsourced call center company FCR.
“Coaching is forward looking and has a plan and feedback is backward looking,” he notes. “When agents learn in the classroom, it’s up to the quality team to ensure the learning is being applied and that goals are set to help learners continue to improve.”
Edited by Mandi Nowitz