How to improve your call centre coaching skills
Coaching is very simple and something we have been doing ever since there was a leader in the cave.
With regard to call centre coaching, I am referring to the most common form of coaching leaders engage in – coaching people to do their jobs better (skills coaching).
This is not life coaching, counselling, therapy, career guidance or personality development.
And with lack of development and dissatisfaction with a manager amongst the leading reasons for attrition, it makes sense to ensure skills coaching becomes one of your key strengths.
Here are my 5 simple tips to improve your coaching skills
If you are leading staff in a call centre, these 5 tips will help improve your call centre coaching skills.
1. Determine a conversation objective
Before you decide to coach one of your direct reports, decide on an objective for the conversation and write it down (for yourself).
By the end of the conversation I want them to:
- Think
- Feel
- Do
2. Plan your conversation
Before you sit down with your employee for their call centre coaching session, spend 5 mins completing the following statements that you can use verbatim (not necessarily in the order below) during the coaching conversation:
- The purpose of the coaching session today is…
- What I want to tell you about is…
- What I want to talk to you about is…
- What I want to ask you about is…
- The way I think you can improve on that is…
3. Get buy-in
Ask the following questions:
- What do you want to work on?
- Is that something you think you can do?
- Is that something you want to do?
- Is there anything holding you back from doing that?
4. Shift the follow-up
Shift the follow-up and ask them to set a time when they are going to tell you about the ‘Rockstar’ they have become.
5. Keep it short
Your call centre coaching sessions should not be longer than 5-15 minutes.
Any longer and you are covering too much for someone to absorb and action.
Research shows the average adult attention span is now less than 5 mins so it needs to be short and punchy.
Happy call centre coaching.
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