In the 1980s, Toyota faced significant challenges as it competed with American automakers. Initially, the intuitive response might have been to just immediately increase manufacturing hours or rapidly scale up production lines.
However, Toyota took a radically different approach. Instead of blindly amplifying production, they meticulously analyzed their entire manufacturing process to pinpoint exactly where inefficiencies and quality issues were occurring. This focused method became famously known as the “Toyota Production System” (TPS).
Similarly, in contact centers, leaders often fall into the same trap, assuming that increasing the frequency of coaching sessions will directly lead to improved agent performance.
However, data from recent analysis suggests that in some circumstances, the opposite may be true: More coaching sessions can sometimes be counterproductive, creating busywork without tangible improvements that actually drive impact for the business. In fact, these extra sessions might even be harming your performance.
In this installment of Cresta IQ, we analyzed anonymized data from diverse contact center environments to explore how coaching activity actually aligns with agent performance and what insights leaders can gain from these findings.
Quality Over Quantity: Understanding the Problem
When contact center managers pile on more coaching sessions, it usually signals one of two underlying problems:
- They don’t know what exactly to coach. Without clarity, coaching sessions become repetitive and superficial.
- They don’t know how to coach effectively. Even if the issues are identified, poorly executed sessions won’t drive meaningful change.
When these challenges take root, coaching becomes misaligned from the behaviors that truly drive performance. Both scenarios result in wasted time that could otherwise be spent on strategic initiatives, direct customer interaction, or meaningful development.
Effective coaching requires not simply meeting mandated session counts but understanding precisely what and how to coach. Investing the upfront effort to identify critical coaching opportunities simplifies achieving meaningful outcomes.
For example, Cox Communications successfully increased their agent-to-manager ratio from 1:10 to 1:14 by leveraging Cresta’s targeted coaching insights to reveal what specific behaviors agents needed help on, significantly boosting efficiency and increasing revenue by 20%.
Forward-thinking companies know that this strategic approach doesn’t just boost agent performance, it transforms operational efficiency by repositioning their greatest asset – their people – to where they’re most impactful. Coaches are able to effectively oversee more agents, enhancing overall performance without adding unnecessary sessions or increasing workload indiscriminately.
Smarter, Not Harder
In some organizations, the agent:supervisor ratio can go over 1:20, indicating that adding incremental coaching sessions is not a feasible option. In fact, the only option is for those organizations to work smarter, not harder.
So what does the data say? We looked at data across thousands of coaching sessions over the past 30 days, and found that in many scenarios, driving behavior change isn’t always correlated with the volume of coaching sessions.
Consider two cases:
In Organization A we see a spread where there are coaches (each circle represents a coach within the organization) doing a lower volume of sessions, but that are more effective at actually changing behaviors than their peers. This may indicate an earlier stage of deploying and refining the coaching strategy, with different levels of effectiveness across the supervisor layer. Often in these scenarios, companies try to solve agent skill gaps by adding more coaching sessions that are ineffective – leading to more time off the phones for agents, with very little or even negative impact on the business.
Results such as these also suggest that they are not tweaking the right variables. Consider coaches 2, 5, and 4: they’re conducting a high number of coaching sessions, but their efforts are not moving the needle when it comes to behavior adherence.
Rather than more sessions without clear direction, the focus should be on digging into the root causes and understanding which behaviors are actually the right ones to target. Without accountability and targeted coaching, resources become wasted, and agent performance stagnates.
Organization B revealed a distribution that we generally think of as approaching the gold standard of coaching at Cresta. The cluster of dots on both sides of the average volume of coaching are all positively impacting behaviors. This indicates that their coaching is effective and focused in the right areas. While most coaches are positively impacting agent behaviors, there are even some coaches that are lower in volume, but higher in effectiveness.
The next steps for this organization might be to then figure out how to get more agents underneath the coaches that are most effective at driving behaviors, but potentially have more bandwidth (like 2, 6, and 5). These coaches are doing great and likely identifying the right coaching opportunities in their agents’ conversations, so giving them more agents to do coaching sessions with can help deepen overall organizational efficiency.
Building an Effective Coaching Framework
What steps can organizations take to replicate these best practices? The data underscores several key strategies:
- Identify Key Behaviors: Move beyond intuition to leverage data-driven insights. Understand the specific behaviors that correlate with successful outcomes – and even identify previously unknown behaviors that will move the needle for your business.
- Leverage Conversation Intelligence: Use AI-powered tech to gain complete visibility into behavior adherence through automated quality assurance, pinpointing the highest-impact opportunities for coaching.
- Standardize Coaching Metrics: Using these behaviors, define a clear dashboard to maintain consistency and clarity in coaching efforts.
Implement Real-Time Guidance: Tap into tools like Agent Assist to extend coaching beyond sessions, triggering personalized hints and reinforcements to agents, encouraging a faster adoption of the impactful behaviors. - Coach the Coaches: Utilize real-time insights to track the effectiveness of coaching, quickly identifying which coaches impact agent performance positively.
Empowering the entire organization with actionable, data-driven insights creates a sustainable pathway to consistent higher performance.
Going Beyond the One-on-One
Let’s think back to that story of Toyota overhauling their approach to manufacturing. The secret wasn’t about working longer or harder; it was about precision and effectiveness. Toyota implemented a targeted coaching methodology within their workforce, training employees and supervisors not merely on producing more, but on carefully identifying and eliminating specific areas of waste and inefficiency. This approach created a culture of continuous improvement and coaching excellence, empowering supervisors to focus their coaching sessions only on the specific issues that would lead to genuine performance gains.
As we’ve seen from today’s Cresta IQ, in the contact center, successful coaching doesn’t stop with formal one-on-one sessions – and crucially, coaching in the traditional sense is just one piece of a much larger puzzle. Leveraging a suite of tools for continuous reinforcement and latent coaching creates a holistic learning environment. Real-time analytics, ongoing behavioral reinforcement, and targeted feedback loops amplify coaching efforts.
More coaching isn’t inherently better; effective coaching is. Organizations that embrace data-driven insights to refine coaching strategies achieve greater impact, operational efficiency, and improved agent performance.
