Coaching isn’t just critical for agents—it affects the customer experience, operational efficiency, and overall productivity as well. But there are call center coaching challenges that can limit its positive impact in all of these areas.
Obstacles get in the way of delivering effective sessions, and getting past them isn’t always easy. In this guide, we’ll cover 12 of the biggest call center coaching challenges you’ll face in the real world, and some tips on how to overcome them.
Coaches often burn the candle at both ends. Not only are they dealing with the day-to-day QA work, they’re also handling escalations, performance and workforce management (WFM), and trying to juggle operational demands—all while still being available for agents.
But you need time and resources to prepare sessions, create and deliver training materials, update knowledge bases, and handle the rest of the tasks that come with coaching. So how do you overcome this obstacle?
If different coaches are using varying coaching methods, styles, or metrics, agents can get mixed messages about expectations. And when you factor in out-of-date training materials, inadequately skilled coaches, and poor reporting, it only gets worse.
In order for your agents and coaches to all be on an equal playing field, there need to be clear standards in place. How do we overcome this?
If agents don’t know how to apply feedback (or simply just don’t want to), you’ll end up with an inconsistent customer experience. The disconnect often comes when the feedback isn’t actionable, or it feels overwhelming. And according to contact center research by Deloitte, 76% of agents feel that way too.
You can break down these contact center coaching challenges by:
Adding new coaching methods or policies can be met with resistance from agents who might be:
This can lead to pushback when you go to make these changes, which then leads to slower progress and adoption. This resistance often stems from uncertainty or a fear of not being able to adapt to new standards. But how can you bridge this gap and overcome these fears?
Without clear data, it’s hard to visualize—or justify—how coaching directly impacts agents or drives better CX. Keeping accurate measurements is important because it helps you create solid benchmarks for your team, track improvements, and guide data-driven decisions.
But without them, you risk focusing on what feels productive instead of what actually is. In order to overcome these call center coaching challenges:
When sessions are sporadic, agents struggle to keep their focus, and issues can go unaddressed for too long. They’re effective in the short term, but they won’t build momentum, making it hard to maintain consistent improvements (or even remembering past sessions).
Think of a new hire: if they only get an avalanche of information during onboarding, and then don’t get a single coaching session until six months in, how will they know how to improve?
The average yearly contract center turnover rate has reached 60%, making it even harder to justify spending time and resources on coaching when churn is so high. High turnover can also erode team culture, impact service quality, and discourage whoever’s left.
Stabilizing your workforce means you can invest in long-term skill development and create strong relationships with experienced agents. Improving retention helps combat these call center coaching challenges. Here’s how you can do it:
Approaches that seem effective with small numbers can easily get out of hand as your team grows. Limited resources, varied skill levels, and an enormous time commitment make it hard to deliver it consistently (while also keeping up with your regular duties).
Implementing scalable strategies ensures every agent gets the guidance they need. To overcome these contact center coaching challenges and scale easier you should:
It's difficult to gauge whether coaching efforts truly improve agent performance when you don’t have adequate insights. You need to track KPIs and metrics while also observing agent behaviors so you can figure out what’s working (and what isn’t). Otherwise, you might spend time and resources without knowing if they deliver measurable outcomes. Instead, you should:
Agents who struggle with empathy, active listening, and communication might fail to connect with customers—and it’s your coaches’ job to pass these skills down. Which means they need to know each agent they work with, while also investing into their needs and wellbeing.
Coaches should know how to correct mistakes, but it’s vital that feedback stays constructive and actionable, so:
Not every agent embraces coaching. Some may feel like it’s targeted criticism, a waste of time, or simply just be more challenging to coach. Without buy-in, even the most well-designed programs can fall flat as agents may not see the value. If you want to change this:
Working remotely is quickly becoming the new norm—58% of Americans are working remotely at least once a week. But with this new digital environment, there are other challenges that might crop up.
Issues like slower communication, lower engagement, and being harder to monitor and observe can make it tough to coach effectively, meaning you should look for different approaches to remote agent training.
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