ICMI's Customer Management Insight - September 2007 - (Page 22) PEOPLE A positive approach to coaching also requires mentors to use proper verbiage when communicating with agents. For instance, the words “you should have” are not advised when coaching agents, says Clifford Hurst, president of Career Impact and author of Your Pivotal Role: Frontline Leadership in the Call Center (published by ICMI Press). Hurst recommends that call center supervisors adopt a Socratic question-and-answer approach when coaching. Instead of telling agents how to change their behavior, try to draw out of them their own analysis and ideas about how to improve, he says. Hurst has identified three questions that supervisors can use when coaching to help agents find their own solutions. He calls them the “Three Magic Questions”: 1. How do you feel that call went? 2. What did you do particularly well on that call? 3. What can you do differently next time? “There is no defensiveness built up by this kind of coaching, Hurst ” says. “And even in the 20 percent of the time that the agent misidentifies the areas most in need of improvement, by the time you’ve gone through these three questions, the agent is much more open to feedback than he would have been before. ” The coaching system espoused at 1-800-flowers.com is a melding of positive reinforcement and purposeful questioning. “We believe in demonstrating a positive approach during our coaching sessions, ” explains Peter Schiller, director of quality assurance and performance manageicmi’s insight M COACHING THROUGH QUESTIONING CMI: How would you describe your monitoring and coaching background? What does your role as director of learning and performance at Magellan Health Services entail? GIBSON: As the director of Learning and Performance, I work with the training team who supports the goals of our service centers. This includes the development of the training staff in the service centers, leadership and supervisory development, compliance programs, such as security and privacy training, and ownership of our learning management system and online learning resources. As a call center supervisor, I was responsible for participating in and supporting quality monitoring initiatives for clients in a variety of industries. As a trainer, I designed training programs that were aligned with quality monitoring programs and designed classroom classes and tools to support supervisors’ coaching efforts. As a consultant, I showed clients how quality monitoring and coaching programs can be aligned with business priorities and objectives and implemented programs in many different types of companies. Finally, at Magellan, I’ve had the opportunity to work on the project team tasked with redesigning and relaunching the quality monitoring program for our 24 service centers. CMI: What are some of the monitoring and coaching best practices that are currently being implemented in call centers? GIBSON: The biggest change I see is a realization that supervisors need training and coaching themselves to learn how to provide effective and motivating feedback to their employees. Just having the monitoring data available isn’t enough — coaching that is realistic, accurate, mature and intentional is essential to improve agent performance and job satisfaction. In the past, it was often assumed that, armed with the data, supervisors would automatically know how to deliver feedback that was motivational and appropriate. Across the board, though, agents hated monitoring because the feedback they received was anything but that. I think that call centers have come to realize that feedback and coaching should be geared not toward pointing out the things agents do that are wrong, but toward helping agents realize their potential, involving them in the process of identifying areas for improvement (both systemic and individual) and underscore the importance of the work they do. CMI: What are test-driven, proven strategies for developing an effective monitoring and coaching program? GIBSON: The most important components are, first, identifying criteria that are “real” — that contribute in a meaningful way to the quality of the interaction — and making sure everyone across all levels of the call center understand the criteria, can articulate the performance standards and know what it means to demonstrate them. By spending time at the outset to educate everyone, you’re more likely to find employees self-monitoring and assisting each other in meeting the criteria. CONTINUED www.icmi.com | SEPTEMBER 2007 22 http://www.icmi.com
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