Call Coaching Burnout

[carterl]

Our call center consist of 84 CSR's. Once a month, each CSR is evaluated and coached on their customer service delivery (soft skills and technical skills) by a Call Coach. The Call Coaches are experiencing, "burnout." Their job responsibilities are redundant. They do the same thing day in and day out. They evaluate, they coach, the evaluate, they coach and so on. Frankly, our coaching program and our Call Coaches need to "get fired up," get motivated and add a little "spice" to the coaching program. How do we keep the Call Coaches motivated so in return, they keep the CSR's motivated? Any suggestions?????

[Lakehurst]

The TSR's are the customers of the coaches. Think about this: TSR's take calls and many of those can be redundant so what do you do that helps them not to expereince burnout. Let me suggest that you take those principles and apply to the coaches. Basically let them do something different on occasion. Pull them together and let them work with you on some answers to this issue.

A couple of questions:

1. Do they know their value due to their unique skills they bring to the call center?

2. What coaching and evaluating process do you have in place for them?

3. Do you have a career pathing process in place for each of them?

I suggest:

Communicate their value
Coach the coaches
Career path the coaches
Get their feedback on their needs

[Julia Blandford]

I have experienced similar situations and am in total agreement with earlier reply suggestions. Would add the following:

1. Look at how the coaches need to record their feedback - if you use a tick sheet method this lends itself to auto pilot 'marking' reflected in the coaching which follows. Think of ways to make this less prescribed - good opportunity to get your coaches and the service reps involved in a re-think.

2. Consider 'rotating' the role - needs careful planning and skill development beforehand - but creates a more flexible workforce with coaching ingrained as a core skill for all (rather than responsibility abdicated to one team)

3. Do you need a central team? Could this be a role your Team Leads take on? Could the call coach role be absorbed into their role (e.g. call coaches become TLs, making team sizes ratio smaller)?

4. Consider - if not already in place - creating a personal development goal orientated approach to the coaching framework. This provides both the call coaches and the reps something to focus on/work towards and helps establish continuity to the coaching session.

5. To add further dimension to the role: As they observe calls, they must come across opportunities for service improvements - they are in a superb position to filter customer feedback and highlight internal process enhancements. Find an effective way for the team to capture these and engage them in implementing these ideas and reward them accordingly.

Sorry to have rambled on a bit - but there are loads of good ideas you could try out - you need to find the ones that best fit the goals of your organisation, its culture and the skill sets of the individuals involved. Good luck with this project and it would be great to hear how you get on!

[Mark Tabak]

I have experienced something similar to what you are describing. I took the Call Coaches and rotated them onto the floor and made them CSRs for a period of time-sometimes a week sometimes a month-and had a CSR be a Call Coach for that same period. This worked very well and gave everyone new perspectives on their own job and others' as well.

[jwiedner]

Often one of the reasons for coaching burnout is the process of monitoring the calls themselves, and waiting for a call to come along that is appropriate to evaluate.

Recording calls not only makes the call monitoring faster, so that you only evaluate the calls that make sense at a time that is convenient, it also greatly improves our coaching process tremendously. For instance, we can allow agents to listen to their own calls and evaluate themselves. You'll be amazed how much they catch, and how tough they will be on themselves. They learn so much from this.

Also, you can use the recordings of other agents to coach your agents by playing back examples of "how to" handle the call properly. Voice and screen recordings make great coaching tools, and can really "fire up" your coaching and training program. I hope this helps. Good luck in your efforts.

[Michcall]

Here are a few other suggestions to provide them some variety/motivation:

>Allow call coaches to tier the team to evaluate strong CSRs less frequently and new CSRs more frequently. It is more to track, but it will give them a feeling that they are using their skills where it will do the most good, and your newer CSRs benefit from increased coaching.

>Design an incentive program for the coaches based on quality scores or some other metric they have influence over. Doesn't necessarily have to be monetary (i.e. longer lunches, time off, trinkets, parking spot, etc.), but it's something for them to strive for.

>Appeal to their expertise in understanding the strengths/weaknesses of your CSR team. Have them identify and focus on a few major areas of improvement and have them do some root cause analysis and brainstorm on how to improve those areas---then train the teams.

>Allow the coaches to design and develop a quality recognition program (if you don't already have one). They may feel more jazzed about the process if they also get to choose 'model' calls, identify top quality performers, put together a bulletin board of quality highlights, come up with quality tips to publish in some format (on-line/newsletter/memo etc) as their 'product' back to the team.