Agent coaching is the bedrock of a successful call center. Coaching helps agents navigate complex interactions with expertise and finesse when done right.
Today, contact center agents need more than just a set of guidelines and an appraisal of their performance. They expect their managers to devise personalized development paths, keep morale high, and help them grow professionally.
In this article you'll learn from contact center veteran's the best practices, challenges, future trends, and AI capabilities that can take your agent coaching strategies to the next level.
This post features learnings from Lisa Strate, who has been in the contact center industry for over 20 years. Lisa has worked with top companies such as Purple, Verizon, eBay, and Netflix. As a people-centric leader, Lisa is passionate about mentoring and coaching agents and managers to help them excel and advance their careers.
Topics we're covering:
- Definition of Agent Coaching
- Why is Agent Coaching Important for Call Centers
- Challenges of Agent Coaching
- Agent Coaching Best Practices
- How AI Assists Agent Coaching
- Agent Coaching with AmplifAI
- Future Trends in Agent Coaching
What Is Agent Coaching?
Agent coaching is a process where a call center agent receives feedback and training based on their performance and skill gaps.
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Ultimately, the main goal of agent coaching is to improve customer experience by making agents more fit to help customers. Coaching can include anything from specific product training to soft skills like listening and showing empathy.
Why is Agent Coaching Important for Call Centers?
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Here are the top agent coaching benefits for call centers:
1. Enhance agent performance
Agent coaching (the right way) increases productivity, improves communication, deepens product knowledge, and enhances problem-solving skills. Coaching allows call center agents to overcome their weaknesses and guides them to handle complex conversations without support.
Agent Performance tip: Coaching is not one-size-fits-all. Each agent requires personalized coaching based on their skill set and learning style. Pre-recorded videos should not be the only source of coach agents. Tap into other sources, such as role-playing scenarios, to overcome performance gaps.
2. Elevate customer experience
Agent coaching prepares your frontline to meet customer needs proactively and resolve customer queries quickly. This creates satisfied customers who are more likely to recommend products and services, boosting customer retention and positive word-of-mouth.
Customer Experience Tip: While coaching your contact center agents, ensure that mentoring covers emotional intelligence (EQ). Being empathic towards customers creates a more positive experience.
3. Reduce call center turnover
When contact centers take agent coaching seriously, it promotes professional development, increases job satisfaction, and reduces call center turnover. If you can help retain top performers and boost employee morale, this will reduce one of the most expensive parts of operating a call center. The more you retain, the less you have to retrain.
Call Center Turnover Tip: Develop a buddy system where a newly joined call center agent gets assigned to a top-performing agent. The seasoned agent can shares their working style and discusses how they manage everything around the office. The buddy system helps new agents ramp up faster while the seasoned agent benefits from gaining supervisor experience.
4. Boost call center productivity
Improved call center productivity is one of the main benefits of successful coaching. Agent coaching directly impacts the call center’s key performance indicators (KPIs), such as First Call Resolution Rate. It’s up to you to decide what you want to achieve in the call center. The more focused you are on a specific measurable goal, the more likely you’ll see progress.
Boosting Productivity Tip: Review call center analytics to guide your coaching strategies.
Challenges of Agent Coaching
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Agent coaching is not as simple as it sounds. It comes with its own set of challenges, which are listed below.
4 Most Common Agent Coaching Challenges
1. Lack of Time
The average call center manager spends 30 hours a week between pre and post-coaching activities. Assuming they have nothing else on their plate (yeah, right?), that leaves them only 10 hours a week to spend coaching a team of 10-15 direct reports.
Every hour an agent receives coaching translates to one hour less time responding to customers.
2. Data Aggregation and Analysis
Call center supervisors manually interpret data from various sources to create performance reports and document coaching sessions. Not only is this process prone to human error, it is extremely time-consuming. Organizations not equipped with the technology to ease these burdens bleed costly hours of inefficient manual work.
3. Lack of Training
Many coaches are first-time leaders or previously worked as solo contributors. Without the right coaching effectiveness assessments and training, coaches might miss important steps in the coaching process.
4. Inconsistent Coaching Models
Coaching with different styles can be fine, but using different coaching models will lead to inconsistent results. Coaching model variations confuse the process leading to coaching improvements that can't be properly quantified against the models used by other team leaders.
Agent Coaching Best Practices
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Here is the list of best practices to follow when formulating your agent coaching processes:
1. Build trust between managers and agents
Call center leadership must build trust with their employees. According to Lisa Strate, building trust will make the call center agents feel valued and create an inclusive environment.
The mantra for a successful coaching strategy isn't a one-way street of giving instructions; it is a collaborative process in which agents should be actively involved in their growth journey.
Trust is the foundational element of success. Once trust is achieved, all of these other tips will be much more effective.
2. Offer personalized coaching
Personalized agent coaching is about customizing sessions to help agents be their best. The more you personalize training based on an agent’s strengths, weaknesses, and personal motivations, the more productive your sessions will become.
As mentioned earlier, this all comes down to data analysis, which can be time-consuming if done manually.
Leveraging a coaching platform that focuses on agent development and personalized coaching is important to make the process feasible and successful. Tools like AmplifAI track progress, identify areas for improvement, take coaching session notes, and even have a coaching effectiveness score.
3. Use a “sandwich” feedback approach
An ideal coaching approach involves sharing both positive and constructive feedback. When coaching call center agents, the focus should not just be on skill gaps and poor performance examples.
How it works: Start by sharing one positive feedback example. Follow with sharing an instance where there is room for improvement. Finally, end with one other piece of positive feedback.
The sandwich method makes constructive feedback easier to digest and a more pleasant experience overall.
Advanced Agent Coaching Technique: Avoid the "But Sandwich"
A well-intentioned sandwich can sometimes be perceived as a “But Sandwich” – because junior coaches will say something like "great job on x, but you need to work on y."
A quick transition can sometimes negate the desired effect of the compliment.
How the best managers do it: Instead dedicate time on praise and recognition, transition, then dedicate time on constructive and/or growth conversations.
4. Use customer feedback for agent coaching
Customer insights and feedback collected from all types of communication is one of the most important inputs for supporting the agent coaching process.
Discussing customer surveys during one-on-ones helps managers understand where the agent is performing well and where they could benefit from further guidance.
Listen to why Lisa Strate says customer feedback is as good as gold in the 3.5-minute video below.
5. Implement role-playing
Role-playing complex situations is an effective agent coaching technique. The practice of call-handling with peers or mentors in a safe learning environment helps agents practice new skills before doing it with customers.
6. Set up SMART goals
S.M.A.R.T. is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Teams that include these 5 dimensions in their goal-setting are more likely to reach their goals than teams who set goals without all of these dimensions.
SMART goals help meet knowledge gaps and resolve customer concerns. It has specific, measurable goals with a stipulated time to achieve those targets.
SMART Goal Example: Call center agents receive coaching tips on performance metrics such as CSAT. However, CSAT is a top-line metric representing multiple contact types and behaviors. It's important to be more specific and measurable with the types of behaviors and the sub-KPI's that are involved in improving CSAT.
Impact of setting up SMART goals
Chewy, like most companies, wanted to improve their CSAT score. While researching how to improve CSAT, they discovered that they were only personalizing their responses 43% of the time. By gearing agents toward specific, easy-to-practice behaviors, managers coached their team to double their personalization rate. As a result, Chewy saw a 10% increase in CSAT.
7. Coach the coaches
Coaches need training to deliver consistent agent coaching. A "coach the coach" program helps maintain high coaching standards across all contact center teams while providing opportunities for coaches to learn from each other.
The focus of these programs should include what coaching methodologies to follow, effective communication techniques, and performance management strategies.
How Does AI Assist with Agent Coaching?
Traditional agent coaching methods are too inefficient for the modern contact center. Lack of time, data overload, knowing when to coach, what to coach, and how to coach, are just some of the burdens contact center leaders face.
AI is a solution many contact centers have considered to overcome some or all of these challenges in agent coaching.
Agent Coaching with AmplifAI
Today, the best CX leaders are focusing on transforming their teams from average to all-star. By leveraging powerful call center coaching software, like AmplifAI, brands achieve scalable data-backed personalized coaching to make their CX fly.
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AmplifAI integrates every element of your contact center - from quality scores to customer feedback - into a unified performance management system. By connecting these data points to coaching actions, AmplifAI enables contact centers like yours to develop high-performing teams through targeted, measurable coaching that gets results.
6 Ways AmplifAI Transforms Agent Coaching
1. Full Data Integration
Unify all your contact center data into one place to drive coaching decisions. No more gathering spreadsheets or hunting for insights. AmplifAI connects every data source that matters - from cloud platforms to spreadsheets. With AmplifAI no insights are left behind.
2. Performance Intelligence
All data is analyzed, from quality scores to customer feedback - into role-based dashboards with KPI's and insights that show exactly where to focus. Get high-performer personas used to establish agent coaching benchmarks.
3. AI-Enabled Coaching
Take the guesswork out of coaching prep. AmplifAI analyzes agent performance patterns to identify the highest-impact coaching opportunities and provides targeted recommendations to team leaders.
4. Coaching Effectiveness Measurement
Track which coaching approaches drive the best outcomes. AmplifAI measures improvement after each session, helping supervisors refine their techniques and replicate what works best.
5. Gamification and Recognition
Get the tools to transform agent coaching into an engaging experience. AmplifAI automatically identifies wins from performance data, generates personalized recognition messages, and creates targeted games based on skill levels and coaching goals. When agents hit their coaching commitments, the system triggers automatic incentive, and recognition actions to reinforce success.
6. Quality Assurance
What good is quality data if it can't be tied to coaching? Tools like auto-QA, remove the data summary and analysis burden, tying these insights directly into actionable coaching recommendations (in real-time).
Future Trends in Agent Coaching
The future of agent coaching is moving beyond basic feedback sessions into data-driven, personalized development that transforms contact center performance.
The goal for agent coaching in 2025 isn't to replace human coaches with AI (that's impossible), but to empower team leaders to spend less time on manual analysis and more time on meaningful coaching interactions that drive exceptional agent performance.
As highlighted in Gartner's 2024 Cool Vendor Report, contact centers are shifting away from fragmented coaching approaches to AI-enabled systems that provide targeted actions alongside performance analysis.
In 2025 contact centers need agent coaching solutions that:
- Unite performance data across all platforms
- Automatically identify coaching opportunities
- Transform insights into immediate coaching actions
- Measure coaching effectiveness and ROI
AmplifAI, trusted by 150+ brands and leading BPOs, is the only comprehensive performance enablement platform that helps organizations move from traditional agent coaching to measurable performance transformation.
Boost your bottom line by building up your frontline in 2025.
Book a demo with AmplifAI to see how AI can transform how you develop and empower your frontline teams.
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