From Resource, February 2004 
Copyright by LOMA

Put Me In, Coach

If increasing and maintaining the level of service your call center provides is a top priority, then Suellen Richardson of Phone Pro has three words for you: coaching, monitoring and calibration.

By Stephen Hall

As any contact center manager knows, getting your employees to perform well and perform consistently—both in their own right and from one employee to the next—is no small feat. Such managers can also attest that relying on the standard annual performance review to single-handedly address this challenge is a bit like taking an aspirin on New Year’s Day and expecting it to prevent headaches year-round.

According to Suellen Richardson, a training consultant with Phone Pro, a company specializing in customer service training and consulting for 18 years, if you want consistently high performance from your call center workforce, it’s very important to do three things consistently. First, you want to coach your employees in an environment where it’s safe for them to make mistakes and learn from them. Second, be sure to monitor their performance when it really counts—on the job, as they’re speaking with real customers—to give you an idea of how they perform when there’s no supervisor at their side to nudge them toward excellence. And third, it’s imperative to use calibration sessions to make sure all of your coaches are not only mentoring and evaluating employees using the same criteria, but are doing all these things with the intention of meeting the exact same performance standards.

LOMA’s recent Contact Center Workshop in Las Vegas, Nevada, opened with Richardson’s presentation, titled "Coaching and Calibration Strategies for Improved Performance," which she began by reflecting on her experiences as a former supervisor of a call center.

"The company I’ve worked for the longest was a company in the travel industry, and for my first year-and-a-half with them, I was on the phones," she recalled. "I did not get coached, and no one was calibrating. They didn’t need to; they weren’t coaching us. Later I became a supervisor of about 18 to 20 people, and in that position, I had never heard of coaching or calibration. And I remember what it was like when I had to write performance reviews for my staff. I was sitting there thinking, ‘OK, I need to write about this person’s customer service skills. Well, let me think back. Well, I haven’t had any complaints about them lately; I also haven’t had any letters of praise, so they’re probably kind of middle of the road,’ and so I would identify them as such. Then I would be writing someone else’s review and thinking, ‘OK, let me think about this person’s customer service skills. Ooh, I had a couple of escalated calls for that person in the last couple of months. They must be having some problems.’ And their entire performance review was predicated on that.

"Now that I know about coaching and calibration, I have no doubt that if I had known about those concepts then, I could have developed my staff so much better, and I probably could have retained some of the staff that I ended up losing during that time," Richardson said. "So I am absolutely impassioned to talk to you about this topic."

Why Coaching Matters

To underscore why coaching is such a vital component to improving call center performance, Richardson outlined some of the realities of call center management and what can happen if coaching doesn’t happen on a regular basis.

"As some of you have probably already experienced in your contact centers, workforce turnover is very expensive, and it can be very stressful to the organization. Customer Interface magazine reports that the average agent or rep turnover per year is about 25 percent. And Customer Care Network magazine says that replacing a worker costs roughly half of that person’s salary, not to mention the burden and the stress that puts on the rest of the staff to have to carry that additional workload while that person is being replaced. Also, I know there are a lot of managers who, following an employee’s departure, are told, ‘Sorry, there will be no replacement. We’re cutting back, and unfortunately, you’ll just have to do the best you can with the staff that you still have left.’ That is where coaching and calibration can absolutely have a positive impact on the job satisfaction and the retention in your contact center."

Whenever the topic of coaching comes up, it’s generally thought of as something that’s done mostly for the benefit of un-derperforming team members. Richardson said that in her previous supervisory role, she thought of coaching this way, too, and that she now understands that neglecting to coach your star performers as well is a big mistake. "When I was a supervisor, I probably spent a lot more time with my problem employees than I did with my good employees," she said. "Sometimes we lose some of our best employees because they never get any attention from us. They say, ‘Nobody knows what a great job I’m doing, except me and the people I talk to. Maybe I’ll get my resume out there and see if there’s somebody out there who might appreciate me a little bit more.’"

In addition, coaching your star performers can also send a positive message to employees who are struggling, Richardson said. "There are some kids out there who get in trouble all the time, because they realize that the only way they can get attention from Mom and Dad is if they get in trouble," she explained. "Some of those troublemakers have grown up, and they have jobs with your organization, maybe even your department. And they think, ‘It’s OK if I get in trouble; at least I get a little attention around here.’ We want to let them know that you don’t have to get in trouble to get attention, and you do that by giving everybody feedback on their performance on a regular basis. So often, the way we find out how we did over a 12-month period is during the annual performance appraisal process. We want to remove that element of surprise. It’s a lot easier to deliver a performance appraisal if you’ve already had discussions throughout the 12-month period."

Acknowledging that the words "coaching" and "monitoring" are often used interchangeably in the contact center world, Richardson explained how different these two concepts really are by comparing management’s definition of coaching with that of front-line employees.

"When you ask management if they coach, the common answer is, ‘Oh yes, we do; we are coaching staff all the time. Sometimes we coach them because they were late; sometimes we coach them because we got an escalated call. So yes, we’re always giving feedback.’ Then you ask the front-line employees if they are coached, and the common answer is ‘No, but we are monitored.’ When I was on the front lines, we were convinced that our team leaders were in their office, listening in on our calls all the time, so we were careful about what we said. Well, when I became a supervisor, I realized I did not have time to sit in my office for 40 hours a week, listening to people’s calls. I was so involved with projects and meetings, and monitoring was not a priority."

To get a better understanding of the difference between coaching and monitoring, Richardson said, it helps to think of each in terms of a sports analogy. "Coaching sessions are like Saturday morning practice for the team," she said. "During those practices, the coach is on the field with the players, and it’s a safe environment in which to goof. The benefit of coaching is that it gives constructive feedback right away. In the call center, this is when the coach is sitting elbow-to-elbow with the front-line employee and saying, ‘Let’s talk about the last call and how it relates to our performance standards before we take another call.’ Then they have opportunities to make improvement in their very next phone call."

But if coaching your employees is Saturday morning practice, then according to Richardson, monitoring is game day. "Monitoring is the behind-the-scenes activity for the purpose of quality control," she said. "And we strongly emphasize the need to use the same set of standards for monitoring that you use for coaching. Coaching should set them up for successful monitoring. On game day, the coach is on the sidelines, and there is a true benefit to having them on the sidelines for monitoring. Let’s talk about when you’re side-by-side with someone for coaching. If Renee is one of my star performers, and I scoot up next to her to coach her call, what do you think will happen to her performance? It can go down. And that can happen in a coaching situation, just from the sheer pressure. On the other hand, let’s say Steve is a lazy employee. When I’m elbow-to-elbow with him in a coaching situation, guess what happens to his performance? It improves dramatically. That’s why monitoring is an important piece of the puzzle: It captures somebody in their most natural habitat, when they’re the most comfortable. So monitoring and coaching are both very key; they each serve a similar yet different purpose."

Although coaching and monitoring sessions are crucial to getting everyone on the same page with regard to performance, it does little good in the long run when each individual coach or supervisor has a different perception of how a phone call meets performance standards in their organization. And that, Richardson said, is where calibration sessions are essential.

"Some of you might say, ‘Yeah, we’re doing calibration,’ all the while thinking, ‘Calibration? I’m still not exactly sure what it is,’" she said. "Here’s the definition: A calibration session is a group meeting to review a series of calls in order to compare your observations to the contact center standards using an unbiased scoring method. The group gathers together in a private room, and we recommend that you include your coaches, managers, supervisors, team leaders, mentors, trainers, and your quality assurance monitors. If you have a department that’s doing quality monitoring, it’s critical that they be calibrated with their coaches. The coaches are trying to set employees up for successful monitoring, and we want to make sure we’re all playing by the same rules and that the quality assurance people aren’t playing tennis while we’re coaching employees to play football."

The group then listens to a taped call without discussion—that is, no horrified gasps, snickering, or foreheads slapped in astonishment over what was said or not said. "It’s very important to remove all that peer pressure, and you might even want to play the call twice, just to remove any human errors," Richardson said. "That happens a lot when I’m facilitating a calibration session with a group. One person will say ‘He did such-and-such,’ another will say ‘He did not,’ and we play the tape again to settle the matter. That can help streamline the amount of time it takes to calibrate."

When it comes to measuring performance, Richardson said, many call centers (including the one she once supervised) tend to work on a scale system. "My background, in terms of performance appraisals, was working on a scale of one to five," she recalled. "A one meant you have one-and-a-half feet out the door; a two meant you’ve got one foot out the door, but we might be able to work with you and improve you. A three meant you were meeting standards, a four meant you exceeded expectations, and a five meant you practically walked on water. And I went to my manager and said, ‘I’ve got to do these performance appraisals, and I already know that somebody on my team is going to want to know what they have to do to get a five. What do I tell him?’ The answer I got was, ‘Well … gosh, you know, we just know it when we see it.’ That’s not a very encouraging way to tell this person what they need to do and to reassure them that the evaluation will be fair and objective."

Instead, Richardson recommends using a scoring system that rates a call on a scale of "yes," "no" or "not applicable." "‘Yes’ means they met the standard, ‘no’ means they didn’t, and ‘not applicable’ means the standard was irrelevant to this particular call and therefore does not count toward or against their score for this calibration exercise," she said. "At the end of the call, each person in the calibration session records their score, and the person who gives the lowest score begins the discussion. This is because he or she saw the most room for improvement in that call, and that can open up the dialogue very quickly to see where your differences are and determine whether they were actual or perceived differences. Also, you might want to start the discussion with the "not applicable" scores. For example, if everyone can agree that putting the caller on hold is not applicable to the call you just listened to, then you’re done with that item, and you can move on to the next standard. Then maybe you go to your no’s. You want to find out not only why people rated something as a "no," but whether all the no’s are a "no" for the same reason. The same goes for the yes’s.

"The goal of this discussion is to arrive at a consensus that brings about more consistency and a clearer understanding of the standards for everybody involved in that coaching session," Richardson said. "It’s important to have an established tolerance level, because we’re human. We hear and see things differently from person to person, and so 100 percent should not be your goal for calibration; that’s probably going to be very frustrating and almost humanly impossible. So for example, you might consider setting your goal for calibration as a range of plus or minus 5 percent between the coaches. Then, one-and-a-half to two years down the road, if everyone’s consistently at plus or minus 5 percent, you might decide to aim for plus or minus 3 percent. Now, according to some experts, getting to that plus or minus 5 percent range can take 10 to 15 hours or more of calibration sessions. So it doesn’t happen overnight, and it may sound easy, but many call center supervisors will tell you it’s not."

But even a flawlessly executed calibration system to keep your award-winning coaching and monitoring programs on track isn’t enough, Richardson warned. "Calibration does not last forever," she said. "You may want to hold calibration sessions periodically, just to limit the amount of drifting apart from consistency that people can sometimes do. Some experts suggest that once you’ve achieved initial calibration based on the established tolerance level, about two to four hours a month can keep a group calibrated over time."

In addition, Richardson said that while the goal of calibration is to achieve service consistency from one call center employee to the next, consistency does not mean mindless conformity to a standard that never allows for individual style differences. "We want to allow certain phrasing differences in how things are communicated to a customer, and often a nuance list is the best solution," she said. A nuance list, she explained, is a list of different ways of expressing the same idea that all meet the standard for service in a certain call situation. For example, if the first step of a hold technique is to ask a question and include an action step—which indicates what the service rep will be doing for the caller if they agree to hold—then there would be several acceptable ways of doing so (i.e., "Would you hold while I check on that for you," "Can you hold while I get that information," "May I place you on hold to get that information for you," etc.). "By the same token, we also want to give them examples of some phrasing that would not fit the standard. For example, simply saying ‘Would you hold?’ doesn’t meet the standard, because it doesn’t include the action step. Also, saying ‘Please hold’ doesn’t meet the standard because it doesn’t ask a question that gives the caller the option of agreeing or refusing to hold."

Finally, Richardson said, it’s a good idea to commit to keeping your calibration sessions at a time limit of 60 to 90 minutes. "The people whom you are inviting to these meetings are very busy people; you know it, because you’re one of them," she said. "And calibration is not going to happen overnight anyway. So plan on having more sessions, but when your 60 to 90 minutes is up, then resolve to end the session, even if you’re in the middle of discussing a call. As you well know, it is so annoying when you go to a regular meeting and you know it always runs over, and pretty soon you’re resentful for having to go. You don’t want people saying, ‘I don’t have time for this calibration stuff.’"

In summary, Richardson said, "Remember that as a call center manager, your customer is the staff in your contact center, and coaching is just a neat way to give personal attention, even to those who used to think they had to get in trouble to get some attention. Also, it gives you a regular program through which you can actually get out and interact with your front-line employees. That can lead to their job satisfaction, which can go a long way toward reducing turnover and increasing customer satisfaction."

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resource@loma.org