The escalating use of digital channels, coupled with consumer behavior shift resulting from the pandemic, have put new stressors on contact center agents and challenged them to provide a positive customer experience. With contact center turnover already between 30–45%,¹ it’s no wonder that 75% of agents say managing case volume has become more challenging during the pandemic.² Customer interactions have become more challenging as well. According to agents, customers with whom they have interacted during the pandemic were:

• More anxious (81%)
• More demanding (75%)
• Presenting more complex cases (75)
• More difficult to satisfy (66%)³

As if agents needed even more stress on the front line of a challenging customer service environment, 85% of business buyers and 79% of consumers already believe that customer experience is as important as a company’s products or services—talk about pressure to perform!⁴

Send in the coach

Coaching is key to the performance of contact center agents. It not only helps get new agents up to speed and handling customer requests effectively, it’s a necessity as products and services change, and the dynamic nature of markets, logistics, and competitors alter customer interactions. Coaching in the contact center can take two forms:

1. QA coaching. This is the type of agent coaching that is typically associated with the contact center. It focuses on maintaining the quality and consistency of the customer experience by monitoring (and sampling) agents, and then having managers work with agents to review calls and identify opportunities to do things differently and better.Examples: Slow down your speech, stop cross-talking, etc.
2. Customer experience coaching. Rather than simply focusing on what an agent can do differently, this type of coaching looks at how the customer experience could have been improved by providing the agent with the information or prompts needed to build a more meaningful and effective interaction.Examples: Present these three points of data when answering that question about the product, based upon the direction the customer was taking your conversation in, here are three questions to ask, etc.

Transforming contact center coaching

In the past, coaching was all about the math—a percentage of calls were sampled (typically 1–3%); of that subset, poor performing agents were identified for coaching. But think about it: You’re only addressing a very small percentage of calls; that means you’re not really getting an accurate view of the coaching opportunities that could have resulted in a better experience for the customer. Of course, doing more than that is just not feasible using a manual sampling and coaching process. But what if automation enabled you to look at 100% of all calls and understand the context of an agent’s conversation so you can tell if a customer is frustrated? What if you could focus only on the agents who truly needed the help to get better, instead of spending time on good performers? What if you could coach in real time instead of in the rearview mirror by providing prompts and content that empower agents to perform better? And what if you had the metrics to view trends that are impacting the performance of all agents, not just the ones being sampled? That’s exactly what you can do with Gridspace.

• Gridspace Sift allows real-time, automated scanning of over 50,000 concurrent calls to simplify agent monitoring and evaluation and promote more effective coaching.
• Gridspace Relay is a skillful voice cobot that puts relevant content and actions in front of contact center agents in real time by working with your existing procedures, macros, scripts, and knowledgebase articles. Now, for example, all agents can have the latest information about new products, and troubleshoot in the moment on the call, without a manager having to whisper in their ear or putting the customer on hold. And, because the contact center—and customer needs—never stand still, managers can author and push new content in response to trending events.
• Gridspace Scorecard is an automatic QA solution that helps you identify the agents who need coaching—across your entire contact center. It instantly scores customer calls on hundreds of performance dimensions and learns from new QA evaluations.

With Gridspace you can identify coaching opportunities for the agents who need help while also gaining a better understanding of performance across the entire contact center—so you can have the right people and processes to provide the best possible customer experience.

• 1. Reynolds P, Exploring Call Center Turnover Numbers, Quality Assurance & Training Connection.
• 2-3. Salesforce, State of Service, Fourth Edition, 2020.
• 4. Salesforce, State of the Connected Customer, Fourth Edition, 2020.