When I talk to members about frontline rep coaching programs, they often want a set of proven rules and concrete, granular steps every supervisor should take to be a successful coach.  It’s akin to the instructions on the back of an instant cake mix box.  Just add an egg and some water – and voila! – you have a delicious cake every time.

While I’d love to tell you I can give you the five easy steps to coaching success, I’ve come to believe that coaching isn’t a science we can replicated identically among our supervisors. 

In fact, it’s more of an art form.  And in art, we can give folks the tools – brushes, colors, and canvas – to create a great piece of art, but we can’t tell them exactly what to do.  We can’t tell them how to hold their brush or precisely how to create the most eye-catching color.  Sure, we can give suggestions, but it’s up to the artist to figure out what works best.

So – just like in art we can give supervisors the tools they need to coach effectively, but we can’t mandate a set of discrete actions to success.  And, like Pablo Picasso’s innate artistic ability, some supervisors are naturals and coach effectively from almost day one. 

Many though, don’t have the innate skills required to coach effectively right out of the gate.  But, if there’s no five step recipe for success here, short of the time and resource consuming task of hiring a set of super-coaches, what can we do to help these supervisors approximate the behaviors of their highest performing peers?   Read More »

Moment of honesty: when was the last time you stopped and considered if you were a good or a bad boss? Not whether your organization was hitting its goals and your MBOs were in good order, but whether you’re truly a great boss.

In a recent HBR blog post, Robert Sutton argues that most bosses believe they are far more effective than their teams perceive. 12 Things Good Bosses Believe is a sobering read, and I’d strongly encourage you to take a look if you manage any staff, period.

Sutton explores many counterintuitive views he believes great bosses embody. Among them, good bosses believe their success – and their team’s success – depends on mastering mundane tasks over breakthrough ideas. Or, bad is stronger than good – eliminating the negative has more impact than emphasizing the positive.

One rule in particular stood out to me given its relevance in service operations where bosses are several layers removed from the action. Sutton claims that many bosses live in a “fool’s paradise” but great bosses accept that they have a flawed, often skewed, sense of what it is like to work for them. They accept staff members having a far more accurate view of reality.

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Sometimes we have to tell people the last thing they want to hear: “No.”

Just think about your reaction when someone tells you no.  You get defensive immediately, right?  No one likes to be told they can’t do something – and your likely response is to start an argument to prove you’re right (and the person who told you no is wrong).

In your world, there are lots of reasons your frontline reps have to say no to customers. Sometimes it’s unavoidable. Sometimes it seems outside your reps’ control.  But, what if you could actually eliminate the negative reaction your customers have when they are told no – just by making a few tweaks to your current approach? Read More »

It’s college graduation time, and that means the inspirational commencement speeches will start to circulate in the press—providing tips on everything from wearing sunscreen to pursuing your passions.  Most college grads will, I’m sure, feel confident their four years of studies have prepared them well for whatever life offers them.  

On the flip side, what about the folks who shunned the classroom for a  “real world” education?  Turns out that some of them have been pretty successful too.

Time Magazine recently published a list of the Top 10 College Dropouts, pointing out that several wildly successful individuals never got their diplomas.  Some names on the list are predictable: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, to name two.  A few others were news to me: Tom Hanks left school to become a theater intern, and Harrison Ford abandoned his philosophy studies to try acting.

Certainly the reputations of these people makes one at least momentarily pause to reconsider the time and expense of higher education as a necessary component of success.  What is it about experiential, non-classroom learning that drives similar outcomes? Read More »

Big revenues and the CEO’s upcoming book release are winning Zappos loads of public press. Zappos doesn’t approach customer service like most organizations. In fact, the company makes it publically clear they have a culture that qualifies as more than just little bit quirky.

One of Zappos’s core principles is to promote employee and customer happiness. Of note on the employee side: Zappos values happy employees so much that at the end of new-hire training, trainees are offered $2,000+ to quit. Read More »

At a dinner party recently, a friend who is a high school English teacher lamented that his students often google answers to their English homework rather than take the time to read.

Of course plagiarism is terrible and it’s critical to teach students skill development through hard work, but another friend questioned his logic: “Is knowledge of an English passage that important?  Aren’t search skills critical as well?”

You can imagine the direction of conversation from here—the table was evenly split among liberal arts and math/science majors—but applying this thought to a service and support environment, it’s an interesting question: Do we need to train staff in critical thinking or do we simply need to provide better access to the answers?
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CCC is kicking off our latest research project.  As with the beginning of every research project, we have a lot of questions right now, along with a few strong opinions.  And while we explore this subject in more depth across the next few months, I thought it might be a good idea to share some preliminary thoughts and begin to gather feedback.

So…what will be the future of quality assurance (QA; a.k.a. quality monitoring)?  Well, to answer that question, we need to first understand what our current state is.  A few things here:

Click to Enlarge | What is the Focus of Your QA Scorecard?

1. A legacy focus on productivity: Although most companies have shifted the majority of their focus to quality rather than productivity, many QA processes are still aligned to a cut and dry mindset that is very reminiscent of “just do it” productivity KPIs. In fact, a recent CCC survey revealed that 64% of companies use regimented performance criteria for QA (as opposed to encouraging a more tailored experience).  In other words:  Did the rep use the proper greeting?  Check.  Say the customer’s name?  Check.  Identify a sales opportunity?  Check. Read More »

While creating CCC’s recent Train-the-Trainer seminar for improving supervisor coaching skills, we developed a number of role play exercises to help illustrate just what world-class coaching looks like.  We had exercises that taught things like active listening skills and tailoring coaching to personality/learning styles, to name just a couple.  And I have to say, coming up with the role play scenarios and instructions was challenging!  Not only is it hard to come up with realistic examples, but it is tricky to make sure that role plays are both:

• effectively illustrating the intended lesson
• easily understood

At times, I felt like Goldilocks—exercises were just too hard (for example, “Is that situation describing Personality A or Personality B?  Seems like it could be either – or both.”) or too easy (you know, coaching 101 stuff).).  In the end, I think we delivered some useful exercises for companies to use in their own training sessions with supervisors.  Read More »

As a diehard men’s U.S. college basketball fan, the four-week period between “Selection Sunday” until a U.S. national champion is crowned, commonly referred to as March Madness, is one of the most intense and exciting months of the year.

Sixty-five teams will tip-off in mid-March, all vying for the crown of “Best College Basketball Team in the Country”.  And while all of the teams have talented athletes, and have achieved successful seasons to reach this stage, it’s their coaches that often deserve the most credit. 

Coaches recognize the strengths and opportunity areas of every player, and help guide each player individually to improvements that will ultimately boost the overall performance of the team.  You don’t find coaches telling players to simply “score more points”; they actually help them understand how to score more points.  And the best coaches emphasize “in-game coaching”, taking a few seconds during the game to guide the player to better performance, without taking him fully out of the game environment.

And while coaching in the contact center occurs almost as frequently as coaching on the court, not enough “in-game coaching” is happening in most contact centers today. Read More »

During Washington, D.C.’s recent “Snowmaggeddon” blizzard, I (like many of my colleagues) found myself working from home.  It was great for a day or two, and I felt very productive. But by day five, I felt, well…isolated.  I think this was different than your run-of-the-mill cabin fever…the isolation I felt was connected to my workplace engagement.

This naturally led me to think about contact center reps who work from home full-time.  Whenever I speak with companies who are considering a work-from-home program, people are aware that it is tricky to keep remote staff engaged, but no one knows how to get over that hurdle effectively. Read More »