Contact Center Coaching 2.0 -Turning QA Insights into Agent Coaching Gold

00:01Hi guys, Tom Laird here. Let me a break down contact center technology on the podcast, time and time again, now it, for me to help you with your challenges. As your a contact center technology advisor through our new company Expivia Digital, I can help you with things like CCaaS selection, any type of AI implementation, and nice studio and integration services. It It's the same honest advice you hear on the geek, apply it specifically to your operation. Visit ExpiviaDigital.com to get started, that's ExpiviaDigital. This is advice from a call center geek, a weekly podcast with a on all things call center we'll cover it all from call center operations hiring culture technology and education we're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of yours and your Welcome. the call center, contact center podcast, we try to give you some action while items take back in your contact center, improve the overall quality, improve the agent experience.

01:10Hopefully we can improve the customer experience as well. I hope everybody's doing great. For those of you who do not know me, my name is Tom Laird. I am the CEO of FreeBSD Inter-Action Marketing. We're a multiple 100-seat contact center located here in Erie, Pennsylvania. Deal with lots of different customers from retail to basic customer services, kind of you name it. We have customers that, uh, we're servicing. Also, as you guys probably know by now, I'm the CEO and founder of auto queue where we are fully scoring contact center, quality calls and using AI. All right, the core contact center side because we have to It's kind of a bridge episode and I did one of these before when the are my new a and really what were some of the mistakes that we saw in so I want to kind of dig even a little bit deeper into that today talk about some of the things that I see as an issue and it doesn't have to be auto OTTO-QAR platform, but lots of different AI-based quality tools and how they can help and how they I've seen them make a lot of difference when it comes to contact centers and not only from saving them money, but also from kind, kind of the quality aspect Not only from saving, but also from

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03:29you're coaching. Like, you know, I just, they don't sound great. We're not getting a great. We're not getting a great reaction when we talk to them, but still on our form, they're scoring out of this world. So we're putting a real predicament as- a

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04:26think are important, and some of the times they are really important, right? But, you know, know, making sure that we kind of bridge that fine line between agent behavior, compliance, analytics, where we have all of these things that people are telling us we need to have. And let's kind of just take a step back and really kind of look at, at some of these things. So again, let's look at a couple of things in this episode, right? The gap between, between kind-of that traditional QA, what we're looking to score, what s maybe the C level, what they think is important compared to a call center manager compared to an agent, right? How do we do effective coaching with those? How do we move beyond just compliance scoring and focus on actual agent development? How can some of these AI powered tools, how can they transform coaching? How can they transform maybe some of the customer experience protocols that we re kind of walking, trying to learn through. And again, looking at

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05:48or improving agent performance, right? It's improving the agent performance, why? So that we can improve the customer experience as well, but again, why do so manyiasco really, with high QA scores struggle with, with CSAT with objective handling first call resolution, right? in the reason is most QA forms are not focused on a right stuff, right? Most of them are focused on compliance and making sure that we don't get sued, right? which is still which is still I really, really, important thing, right? But we have to kind of talk through some of these things where, you know, that false hustle, right? And that's kind of the book that I wrote where, where we talked about things that we think are important but really has no impact on the, the customer experience. It has no impact on first call resolute, but it may be made here, issue, or maybe just something that kind of makes us, you know, we can't put a hand around really how to score something.

06:49So we give the agent a sentence, we give them a phrase, we tell them to say something. Again, you guys have heard me talk about empathy, right? Every single person that we see when we get an auto QA customer, they have a question. Did the agent show empathy? Or did the agent use an empathetic statement, which I hate, hate, right? And most of the time we're just checkboxing it. Did the agent say something like, I'm really sorry to hear that? No matter what the tone was, if they did it, we check it and we're happy about it, right? Again, we're looking at things like, did the agent follow the script? Did they use the company's name twice, right? Did they, you know, they're trying to check these boxes on a QA form because when we were manually scoring, and most of you still are manually scoring, we didn't know how to do certain things, right?

07:37How do you score engagement, right? Well, we came up with these things like using the customer's name three times in the first two minutes, right? All of these kind of, I don't want to say silly things, but ways that we had to use as human beings, right, who can't listen, who were not programmed to listen to call after call after call, especially if you have 10, 15 minute calls, and really dig deep into the entire call and think through what happened at the beginning, middle and end, but when you're at the end, what happened at the beginning, what did they say? that affect a question at the end, right? And that's why I think the manual scoring process is really the kind of the low hanging fruit for where AI is coming in, right? Because we can now look at entire calls, we can look at them in multiple ways.

08:24We can dig deeper, we can educate our agents, you know, at a different level, right? And I think, you know, when we can move from just scoring calls and giving scores based on these checklists to finding out the kind of the two things that we'd like to say, right? The intent of the agent and the outcome of the question or the outcome of that interaction with the customer. Those are the two important things. Not if we use the company two times and we used it once in the greeting and then we use the agents or the customer's name three times and we follow the script. but did all of that lead to a better outcome? And I think we're starting to be able to see that and we'll be able to quote unquote score behaviors at a much deeper level because AI can actually think. And instead of taking that one call from Timmy or Susie and scoring that and then kind of talking to him about it, now we can take a hundred calls or 50 calls from them and we can start to look at patterns.

09:30We're not just looking at did they screw something up one time? And again, with these kind of auto QA platforms, everybody asked me, Tom, Well, they improve, you know, our CSAT, our NPS. I do it all the time and my answer is no, if you're using a garbage form, right? If your form isn't great, you're still scoring bad behaviors or, or you're scoring things that don't make an impact. You're just scoring more of it, right? And I think we need to start to look at now, the questions that we're asking from an agent standpoint. Again, you guys have heard me say this a million times, it's just the greatest example, right? Instead of saying. You know, for for did the engagement did the agent use the customer's name three times in the? The first two minutes minutes, right? We can actually ask? Ask hey, did they use?

10:25Did they have a tone that actually grabbed the customer, right? Maybe raised or lowered sentiment raised or lowered the or lowered the, tone of the customer, right? Did they use just words that were enthusiastic, did they use a tone, did they, again, look at the actual behavior of the agent, on

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11:05beginning to end, right, that's the other the one point we said this one phrase, you know, during the the beginning of a call, but, you know, this customer had five different issues, right, so how do we measure that? Well, we can say, hey, look through the call, find all the times where customer had a pain point and then did did we responder to the agent a little bit of leeway. Let's talk about agent behaviors, right? Call control. Let's look at empathy. You got to have a greeting. Say maybe your H greeting is scripted. That's fine. We look at kind of those type of things. We have to have compliance things, right? Did they, did they say the disclosure? Does that have to. Be verbatim? Do they get a little bit of leeway? Right? The other cool thing here is with a lot tools now, right?

12:23You don't just have to score black and white, you can score to cultural issues that you talk with with the agent. Meaning, if you have a disclosure, yeah, some of that, it's got to, it's got to be black and white, right? They have to read the verbatim, every single, IS to be dotted, T has to be the cross as they're be talking, but a lot of times there We can start to look for patterns, right? We are

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13:41I think, again, leading to things to actual improvement, having really two way conversations now over these things, right? Most of the time the agent will tell you what they're struggling with, right? When- when you kind of look at the overall when you tell them what they're struggling with, sometimes they get to make mistakes when we just look at one or two or three different calls., right? that, that might not tell the picture where the agent is actually struggling, right. right. I think, you know, talking to agent having the overall kind of plan for them is a. Really important deal when you can get not just say, hey, you're screwing up this one question, but kind of give them an overall package of where they're struggling and how you can help them. Right. t I think, you know, with AI, we can look at tonal issues.

14:38We can look at, at sentiment a little level, we can score sentiment. We can see at the beginning of the call foothold, did the agent have a lower sentiment, but we raised their sentiment to a higher level because of the things that we did. All of these the things can, quote unquote, scored on, on your QA using AI looking at not just the agent behaviors, getting back to this compliance thing, but these agent behaviors we can now look at that scale. And the other thing is looking at scary stuff. And scary stuff, meaning a compliance issue, right where before you're pulling a needle in a haystack to see if an agent is doing something wrong and maybe boom you give them an auto fail, right? a large swath of customer calls from an agent and flag certain behaviors. To understand this We, we could get in trouble with this, you guys have to make sure that you're reading this disclosure rate, that we're getting, getting a yes instead of a yeah on the call.

15:49You know, all of those things kind of come into play. And again, the compliance and again, the compliance issues are the easy part, but we can get much deeper the, insights of them, right? But also again, focus more on these aging behaviors. And I think looking at auto fails is something that we had to do because we didn't know we didn't have patterns. We didn't have a large swath of calls And again, auto fails Again, auto fails are still going to be there, but again, if you have 100 calls from an agent,

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17:25this agent is struggling with or they're You're continuing to work on and it's cool to and I, S I'm I'm a - I the a to that, a in the' the they help the coach, right? You can't just go up to an being really specific with these things, again is I think another thing that these tools can can kind of help us, a new supervisor for struggling to kind of get these insights into calls and then kind of be able to turn them behaviors that a coach can help with, and that the,

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19:39better, you know, but we're starting to see AI tools, tools the same customer name their tone all the questions that they have send it to the AI use an AI voice and then have that agent after they've been in their tone, all the questions that they have send it to AI, use an AI voice. And then have that agent right after they've been coached actually actually code again, Right? And use the AI avatar of the customer that they just bombed to have that interaction again. And maybe they didn't show empathy. Maybe they didn't really they forgot to cross seller upsell. Maybe they didn't control the call. Now they can take those things that we just talked through right those insights that we gave had a a little bit of coaching and then boom you supervisor will be able to take that information, understand the rubric, understand everything with the program, and be insights into the agent as well. I'm not totally there yet with the full coaching aspect. We're playing around with it standpoint. I still think that that's a human behavior. But You're gonna start to see that as as kind of even 2025 kind of rolls around. So again, this is the low hanging fruit. This is the cheapest, most inexpensive way to get into the AI game for your contact center. This is instant ROI, if you're choosing the right platform. And more importantly, this is instant uh, improvement with your agents. WhenB you're using this tool correctly. Um, I think again, just kind of checking, you know, the concept of AI to pull more, to pull more data points.

21:44Yeah, I mean, that's the, the, the biggest thing, right? Looking to be able to say, say, hey, here's the six things, these last 200 calls that really you within if we can fix these six things, we're going to be in a really good spot. And not only can you see the individual agent, but you can see that at your contact center at scale, right, to be able to see now, like with auto QA dashboard, you can see, hey, 17% of the agents, or I'm, it should say calls, 70% of the calls didn't use the proper greeting, didn't show empathy, didn't use this rebuttal. And again, we get back into how the form is set up. Is that kind of check boxy? Is that making sure that we're not using this just as a policing form? But still, those those are behaviors that still have to happen. You have, have to have a good greeting.

22:43You have to maybe use the customer's name, you, know, protocolsI, for compliance calls for compliance. When you're verifying a

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23:47and the usage model. I, I think hopefully can have a real benefit and have instant ROI and also instant improvement into your So again, again, thank you

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24:17You know, even looking at things, that maybe should be, should be