How Coaching Can Increase Sales Conversions In the Contact Center

As the famous author and motivational speaker, Simon Sinek once said, “When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.” 

This simple concept helps explain why the most successful organizations around the world are invested in ensuring that their employees are happy, motivated and empowered to succeed with the resources they need. 

In the contact center, when agents are equipped with advanced technology tools, not only does their immediate performance improve, but their engagement and job satisfaction enhances as well, producing exponential benefits for the organization’s operations, culture and morale, sales, and of course, revenue. 

The contact center has traditionally failed at doing so, and the past eighteen months have exacerbated this reality. However, this should not be the case for any contact center or sales department looking to increase conversion rates through technology driven coaching. 

“Amid the noise of today’s many technologies, a strategic focus on more effective coaching is the key to building competitive advantage for contact centers.” - Ethan Barhydt, CEO & Founder, VoiceOps. 

Over the past year and a half, it’s estimated that digital transformation initiatives and technology capabilities relating to customer experience and sales, including employee training, have been expedited years into the future, and for good reason. 

Increasing consumer demands calls for more properly equipped agents

Consumer expectations have risen dramatically as customers are no longer willing to interact with businesses that do not provide exceptional conversations, and more specifically, agents that are not properly equipped to personalize interactions, make accurate recommendations, and respond to behaviors efficiently and accurately. 

According to CCW Digital research, the top two consumer demands customers judge experiences with agents on is now accuracy of information, and speed and efficiency, partially because we have now seen a world of customer experience and sales that lacked these capabilities. 

The vast majority of consumers will switch to a different brand after just one to two low quality interactions with a brand if these demands are not met in conversations with sales agents. 

Long gone are the days of inexperienced contact center agents toggling between systems, struggling to treat customers like people as opposed to numbers, guessing at how best to serve them with little to no contextual information, or failing to adhere to key behaviors that should be capitalized on in sales and collection processes. 

As AI, automation, and self-service is taking the burden off contact centers (and the increase in inquiries/volume they’re receiving), resolving low-value interactions, the result is - agents need to be coached on the right human behaviors and support that ultimately improves revenue and sales rather than simply handling call volume.

The need for better coaching and where it will help

Without the right tools, reps become frustrated with inadequate feedback, not trusting the guidance they do get from coaches since it’s based on incomplete context (such as only one call at a time). Reps are left unable to understand where and how they can improve. Exacerbating the problem, 94% of the call center leaders surveyed by McKinsey expected skill demands for call center reps to increase by 2023. Without effective coaching, additional demands only leave reps more flustered with subpar performance—and dissatisfied with their jobs, producing low morale and high turnover. 

Coaches are crucial to transforming human conversations and connections in sales. As VoiceOps highlighted in a previous report: The Benefits of Behavior-Based Coaching: Build Trust and Create a Consultative, Customer-Centric Team, coaching and training was the most urgent investment priority for call center executives in 2019. 

When companies transition to behavior-based coaching, they create a more effective feedback loop for employees that improves two relationships in the sales cycle: coach with agent, and agent with customer. When connections between these two groups get stronger, revenue results get better. 

Hiring/coaching agents for different skills such as creativity and empathy is believed to be essential for creating the contact center of the future for 43% of contact center and CX leaders surveyed, according to CCW Digital’s 2020 research. 

However, hiring, coaching, and training agents requires more than a conversation with managers, or lessons from coaches and managers on how to be more empathetic, or find customer history faster. 

In 2021, when we asked respondents “In which areas would you like to allocate more of your department's budget?” employee training and coaching was the number one rated response (49%) out of 17 categories, including customer journey mapping and design, digital engagement, intelligent routing, fraud prevention, and more, as VoiceOps highlighted as well. 

Yet, despite the substantial increase in investments in coaching and training programs over the last two years, research shows that contact centers are struggling with slow or nonexistent performance improvements and high variability between reps. 

How VoiceOps can help

For this reason, we sat down with VoiceOps, the leading solution provider in coaching enablement to understand their product and how they’re helping contact centers equip agents to increase sales conversions and create more seamless operational workflows through the coaching and training of agents. 

VoiceOps is the first and only coaching enablement solution for contact centers that helps companies achieve higher ROI by making customer contact coaches more effective. 

“We don’t call ourselves call analytics or conversation intelligence - we’re coaching enablement, because VoiceOps partners with companies to address both strategic and operational needs related to turning contact centers into a strength for the entire company, including: what’s the coaching strategy, how to measure the right data, are they getting the results they want, and how to iterate on it.”  - Ethan Barhydt, CEO & Founder, VoiceOps. 

The VoiceOps Coaching Enablement Platform drives lasting behavior change among reps at scale that leads to higher conversion rates, reduced attrition and ramp time, and a more consultative experience for customers, adhering to today’s top consumer demands. 

“Everyone from agents through managers to leadership trusts the same data on what people are doing and not doing on the phone. Agents believe the feedback they get about how to improve, managers know who and how to focus coaching without having to listen to calls, and leadership can keep an eye across teams on performance trends.” - Ethan Barhydt, CEO & Founder, VoiceOps. 

For one brief example on the benefits that VoiceOps can provide: Westlake Financial implemented VoiceOps and saw a 5X increase in coaching volume and a 34% increase in behavior adherence. They coached on behaviors such as “Assumes the Payment” thousands of times across calls in the span of a few months. This led to a 3% increase in conversion rate.

As technology advances at an exponential rate, consumer expectations continue to rise, and sales conversations and customer experiences become more competitive than ever, the agents (and their performance) must be front of mind for business leaders. When contact centers are able to invest in their employees, as well as the resources, tools, and technologies they need, they’re able to enhance the employee’s job satisfaction, productivity, capabilities, the experience customers have, and ultimately sales and revenue for the organization.

If you’re interested in learning more, we recommend tuning into VoiceOps’ recently launched “Always Be Coaching” webinar and podcast series, with monthly webinar sessions and weekly podcasts about how contact centers can make coaching their superpower. 

It’s time to make contact center training your organization’s competitive advantage, and turn behavior-based, agent coaching into a revenue driver for your business. 

MEASURE ADHERENCE TO YOUR CALL FLOW

-Work with VoiceOps experts to map your team's call flows to measurable behaviors

-The VoiceOps system automatically tracks adherence to key behaviors across calls

-Dashboards show you metrics that matter for your business, with no extraneous data to make your views messy

-Coaches can easily identify each rep’s areas for improvement and major "coachable moments" across many calls at once

DESIGN AND EXECUTE A WORLD-CLASS COACHING STRATEGY

-By combining AI with human-in-the-loop operations, VoiceOps delivers complete contextual understanding of each call so your managers and coaches will trust the data—and never listen to full call recordings again

-A simple, efficient workflow allows managers to coach on 10 times the number of calls per rep in less time

-Coaches can easily provide reps consistent feedback across calls on behaviors that need improvement, reinforce successful execution, and increase rep buy-in to the coaching process

-Managers can aggregate feedback, metrics, and activity in-app to make preparing and running valuable 1:1 coaching sessions a breeze

-Leadership can measure execution against coaching expectations to get visibility into how managers are performing, so you can "coach the coaches"

CLOSE YOUR PERFORMANCE GAPS, REDUCE ATTRITION, AND INCREASE ROI

-Measure increased adherence to your key call flow behaviors across time by rep and team

-Better, more focused coaching leads to quicker ramp times, higher performance, happier reps, and reduced turnover

-A skilled team on the phone provides your customers with a more supportive, consultative experience

-Increased behavior adherence and satisfied customers lead to higher conversion rates and more revenue