Coaching top executives is all the rage these days, and is increasingly endorsed—and paid for—by companies hoping to get the most out of their top brass. For example, Bob Nardelli, former CEO of Home Depot and himself the beneficiary of extensive coaching from his own mentors, has stated that he absolutely believes that “people, unless coached, never reach their maximum capabilities.” And Jerome Arbanel, VP of executive resources at Citibank, is on the record as saying that even modest improvements are worthwhile in executives. “An investment of $30,000 or so in an executive who has responsibility for tens of millions of dollars is a rounding error.” So why not coach the people who represent your brand to the outside world—your contact center agents?
Contact Center Software Mashup Makes Agent Coaching Easier
Sure, contact center agents don’t have the profile of guys like Nardelli. But to the people who call, email or connect via chat to your agents, what those agents do and how they treat customers IS your brand. And thanks to a recent mashup of KnoahSoft quality management software and 8x8’s cloud-based call center software, contact center managers can see and hear exactly how a call was handled—and how the agent might improve—for a tiny fraction of that executive coaching “rounding error” expense. That’s because when quality management is integrated with call center software, supervisors can listen to recordings of agent interactions, watch what is happening on the agent’s screen and provide coaching to agents to make them proficient in the specific skills that they need to perform.
Integrated 8x8-KnoahSoft Call Center Software is Much More Than Recordings
This cloud-based call center software mashup—which works the minute the service is turned on, thanks to the Cloud—is much more than just recording calls. KnoahSoft provides a comprehensive set of tools to manage the entire process of agent performance improvement. For example, 8x8’s cloud-based call center software service is now available with these KnoahSoft enhancements:
- Decide when to record. Managers can choose the percent of calls to be recorded and pick different frequencies based on a number of different criteria.
- Listen to and manage recordings while watching what agents actually saw and did. A dashboard lets viewers see, hear and jump to specific sections of a given recording.
- Manage the long-term performance of your contact center. See how your agents have performed historically, and get real time snapshots to identify problems before they escalate into issues that significantly impact customer satisfaction.
- Tools to manage the process flow of quality management: The KnoahSoft-8x8 call center software mashup provides administrators with the right set of recordings, to ensure that all agents are checked and to see to it that the ones who need additional attention get the coaching they need. These statistical tools also integrate with training modules to provide agents with the information they need to improve performance.
These cloud call center software improvements can go a long way toward improving the quality of agent responses.
See What the Troops on the Ground See
Also, the power of being able to see what the “troops on the ground” see is invaluable for businesses seeking to improve their processes. That’s because sometimes, the needed improvement is in the process, not the agent.
Call Center Software Mashup Helps Detect and Streamline Processes
But until managers and executives can see the process through the agent’s eyes and ears, it’s hard to detect clunky, unrealistic or unworkable parts of customer service or even a defect in an interface, a product or a service being sold. Companies can become more data-driven as they streamline and improve their processes, inside and outside their contact centers. The 8x8-KnoahSoft mashup is admittedly one piece of a larger, total quality management program, but it’s an important part, because it’s the part the customer sees. And nowhere is coaching more necessary and cost-effective than in the contact center. Learn more about what you can do to assist agents in being the best they can be with contact center quality management from 8x8 and KnoahSoft.