The benefits of coaching

Coaching is a very useful form of development in many spheres of work but it has particular application in contact centres, and there are many benefits for the following reasons:

• It provides a regular opportunity for the team leader and adviser to discuss levels of performance.
• It is flexible and can be undertaken when it is needed and around work requirements.
• It is targeted at the needs of the individual.
• It allows targets to be agreed and then monitored.
• It can be part of a regular series of development and can therefore be linked to previous coaching sessions.
• It connects formal classroom training with actual practice.
• It provides much opportunity for two-way communication between the team leader and the adviser.
• It can be carried out in real work situations.
• It can build rapport between the coach and the learner.
• It can be targeted at specific actions and be standalone.

The value of coaching would appear to have a positive impact on employee attrition. Significantly, only 29 per cent of centres that provide at least two hours/agent/week of coaching had attrition problems. This increased to 48 per cent of contact centres which provided less than two hours coaching/week 

Contact centres are frequently very target-driven focusing on quantitative measures and clearly specifying how things should be done. This o en translates into detailed and strongly enforced scripts that allow little room for freedom on the part of advisers. This dictatorial approach may ensure a minimum standard of service but, unfortunately, it is unlikely to result in excellent service.

Telling people is nearly always less effective than asking them for their views and building towards a common understanding. If an idea originates from an individual rather than being imposed from above it is more likely to be adopted and be more enthusiastically applied.

Both coaching and mentoring in their purer forms are designed to bring about a desired outcome focusing on a joint agreement about behaviour, motivation and commitment. In some forms of coaching, eg high-level sports coaching, a lot of pressure is sometimes applied to the person being coached; however, this is rarely successful in work situations.

There is some confusion about the differences between coaching and mentoring and much of this arises because quite a few of the approaches overlap with each other.