Coaching is crucial for driving employee engagement and performance, yet many customer service leaders today fail to leverage its benefits, struggling to unlock the full potential of their employees and achieve significant performance improvements.
To reduce the risk of attrition, improve employee engagement, and boost overall workforce performance, Gartner recommends customer service leaders transform their coaching strategy from a reactive to proactive model with three key actions:
1. Implement a Coaching Framework
Service and support leaders must transform their coaching strategies from reactive, ad hoc interactions focused on performance concerns to proactive, tailored coaching centered on maximizing employee potential and accelerated by modern coaching platforms.
A coaching framework enables supervisors to be proactive by doing the following:
- Making space for coaching -- Prioritize supervisor coaching time by shifting non-coaching activities away from supervisors to others in the organization.
- Implement coaching essentials -- Establish consistency, accountability and responsibilities for coaching.
- Deliver coaching with personalization -- Guide supervisors to adjust their coaching delivery to the unique needs of their employees.
- Boost the impact of coaching with technology -- Implement modern coaching platforms to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of coaching.
2. Continuously Assess Organizational Coaching Effectiveness
Service and support leaders should continuously evaluate the impact of their coaching improvement efforts. Everyone's ability to apply learned approaches is not equal, and some supervisors might simply return to old habits, therefore it's important to use different data points to identify bright spots and opportunities for improvement.
Coaching should be assessed on a regular basis through employee performance data, pulse surveys, supervisor self-assessments, 360-degree performance reviews, and employee promotions data. Leaders should leverage tools to better understand rep perceptions, including the time currently spent on coaching and the effectiveness of their coaching.
3. Create a Culture of Coaching
Creating a culture of coaching means building it into the foundation of the organization. Coaching must be seen and felt as natural; it is not an initiative with a start and end date. Reps shouldn't feel like they're being punished. Instead, they should feel their skills are being developed and their performance is improving, leading to greater confidence that translates into personal or professional growth. To build a culture of coaching, service and support leaders should do the following:
- Educate and coach -- Train and coach the coaches and upskill as observed opportunities to improve emerge. Partner with HR to adapt existing materials and development programs for service and support coaches to leverage. Managers of supervisors must provide coaching of supervisors to ensure positively demonstrated behaviors are recognized and reinforced and that areas of opportunity are identified and agreed upon where improvement is needed.
- Set expectations -- Determine expected outcomes of coaching and add coaching requirements into leaders' performance metrics. Communicate these expectations during town halls and require leaders to cascade messages to their teams to reinforce organizational understanding of coaching.
- Recognize success -- Identify and recognize bright spot coaches who demonstrate coaching effectiveness by the defined outcomes who have an effective process for achieving those outcomes. In addition, recognize reps who have demonstrated coachability and are seeing performance gains and career opportunities as a result.
Jonathan Schmidt, Kathy Ross, and Melissa Fletcher are analysts/researchers in the Gartner Customer Service and Support practice, covering topics such as talent and operations, customer experience, service and support strategy and leadership, and more.