I once had a colleague, who when walking into and through the office, would often say “Never enough time...”
He was right, and on so many levels.
Particularly so in the contact center, where agents are under constant and too often growing pressure to provide even better service to increasingly demanding customers. While at the same time having to meet - or if possible, preferably exceed - exacting performance and productivity metrics.
A critical component of ensuring high – and higher – standards of performance and productivity is having agents well-trained. Also, to have coaching available to help them immediately and successfully address any issues that crop up in customer interactions.
But here’s the rub: coaching and training consumes time. Time that would need to be found in the agents’ schedules. Time that would have to be spent off-hook and offline and away from engaging with customers. Time that costs money.
So, how can contact centers balance these issues: finding the time and justifying its allocation while ensuring excellent, timely customer experiences (CXs)? Can the ever-developing AI-based solutions help manage this issue?
To find out, we had a conversation with Dan Smitley, a leading workforce management (WFM) authority and founder of 2:Three Consulting, whose mission is “to optimize workforce management while prioritizing the value of every individual.”
Q. How have coaching and training sessions been typically scheduled?
There are probably three ways this tends to happen, and most organizations are using some mix of all three whether they realize it or not.
The first is what everyone is aiming for. Ops identifies who needs coaching or training and why, and the WFM team works with Ops to place it into their schedule(s) in a way that doesn’t create unnecessary service level risk. It’s planned out, or at least as planned as it can be.
Then you have the more real-time version of that, where something comes up and Ops just needs to address it. WFM gets pulled in, or sometimes WFM is just informed, and everyone kind of accepts that the service level might take a hit, but the issue is worth it.
And then there’s the version that’s really just friction between teams. Ops pushes coaching into the schedule regardless of impact, or WFM supervisors push back because they’re trying to protect service level. At that point, it’s less about scheduling and more about a lack of alignment.
Ideally, coaching and training are planned and you’re using available time without really feeling it from a service level perspective. In reality, most teams are bouncing between all three depending on the situation.
Q. Have you been seeing – and do you expect to see – changes to both coaching/training and in setting aside time (and how much) for them?
I think there’s a version of the future where coaching and training increase, but it’s not automatic.
As more of the simpler interactions get handled through self-service, what’s left for agents to resolve or complete (like an involved sale) is just harder to accomplish. That should create more need for coaching and training, and in theory it should also create some space for it.
“If agents are viewed more as a cost to manage, then time away from the queue is always going to be questioned.” —Dan Smitley
The part that complicates that is the cost is very easy to see. If I pull 20 agents into a training session, I can do the math on that immediately. The benefits are a lot less obvious. You’re trying to improve conversations, reduce churn, build better skills, and a lot of that shows up indirectly if it shows up at all.
At the same time, even small reductions in volume start to put pressure on headcount. If you’re deflecting 5% of contacts, it’s hard for a leadership team to ignore that and not at least ask questions about staffing.
So, you’ve got this tension where the work is getting harder and arguably requires more investment, while the math is pushing you to do the opposite.
Where I have seen clear change is in how the time gets scheduled. Tools like Intradiem and QStory have taken a lot of the manual effort out of placing coaching and training into the day. That part is just getting easier and more precise.
Whether organizations actually use that to invest more in development is still very much up in the air.
Q. What challenges are you seeing in the ability and the justification for scheduling coaching and training, including time spent away from customer interactions?
A lot of this comes back to how the organization views the role of the agent, and that shows up pretty quickly in how easy or hard these conversations are.
If agents are viewed more as a cost to manage, then time away from the queue is always going to be questioned. If performance is acceptable, there’s not a lot of urgency to invest more into development. And if anything, the pressure is usually in the other direction.
But if agents are viewed as part of how the company delivers value to customers, then coaching and training are a lot easier to justify. Not because the cost goes away, but because the expectation is that it leads to better outcomes.
Even then, it’s not simple. The cost is immediate and visible. The benefits are often preventing something from going wrong later or improving something that’s hard to tie directly back to a single training session.
That’s where a lot of teams struggle. They know coaching and training matter, but it’s hard to prove in a clean way. And if you can’t articulate the upside clearly, the conversation usually defaults back to cost.
Scheduling Training Remotely
In the traditional on-premise contact center, coaching often takes place with the coach or supervisor sitting with the agent, while training will sometimes take place in another room. Moreover, supervisors can see and hear as well as monitor whether the agent is available.
But with remote/hybrid work having become more accepted in the contact center, that “tap on the shoulder” doesn’t happen if the agent is not in the office. At the same time, flexibility is one of the hallmarks of this method.
So, we asked Dan Smitley, “Has the adoption of remote/hybrid working in many contact centers affected their ability to ensure agent availability? To schedule them for coaching/training?”
“It has, just not always in obvious ways,” says Dan.
“With remote and hybrid environments, there’s a lot more flexibility in how schedules are built. You can get much closer alignment between staffing and demand with things like split-shifts or varied start times.
“That’s generally a good thing. It smooths things out and makes the operation more efficient.
“At the same time, when you’re scheduling that tightly to demand, there’s less excess capacity sitting in the schedule. And that excess capacity is often where coaching and training used to live.
“It also makes group training more complicated. When everyone isn’t working the same general schedule, getting a full team together takes more effort.
“Having said that, I still think the trade-off with remote/hybrid work is worth it. Flexibility is a win for both the business and the agents. It just means you have to be more deliberate about how and when you create space for development.”
Q. Is the infusion of AI into the contact center, both to deflect but also to shorten and improve the outcomes of customer contacts, impacting coaching/training and in scheduling agents for these sessions? In agent forecasting?
It is, but probably more in terms of pressure than clean solutions.
The scheduling side is improving through AI and automation. It’s now easier to place coaching and training into the schedules without someone manually trying to protect service levels all day.
The bigger shift is in the type of work agents are doing. As more gets handled through self-service, the interactions that make it to the agents tend to be more complex. You see some of that in handle time, but that doesn’t really capture how mentally or emotionally taxing those conversations can be.
From there, organizations tend to go one of two directions.
- Some lean into the efficiency side and reduce headcount as volume drops. That makes everything tighter, including the ability to schedule coaching and training.
- Others look at the same shift and decide they need to invest more in their agents because the job itself is getting harder.
Where it gets messy is in how we talk about upskilling. It can mean a lot of different things depending on who you ask. Like better soft skills, better sales outcomes, or preparing someone for a different role entirely. If that’s not clearly defined, it’s hard to build a real case for it, and cost savings usually win out.
Q. What are your recommendations to contact center leaders and managers who seek to ensure their agents are well-trained, performing to the best of their abilities, and continue to work for their employers?
A lot of this comes down to being honest about what you expect coaching and training to actually do.
If it’s just something that’s an option, and that you try to fit in when there’s extra time, it’s always going to get squeezed out. There’s always something more immediate pulling agents back to the queue. And in a lot of organizations, that’s exactly how coaching and training are treated.
That’s where coaching and training really splits, and with this your ability to justify the agent and supervisor time and resource allocation to the C-suite.
If they’re viewed as optional or just a way to use idle time, they’ll never be consistent and they won’t drive much impact.
But if they’re viewed as part of how you build better agents, better customer outcomes, and even future talent for the organization, then they start to look a lot more like a requirement than a nice-to-have.
That also means being clearer about what you’re developing:
- Upskilling sounds good, but it’s vague, as I noted earlier. Are you trying to improve how agents handle complex conversations? Increase sales effectiveness?
- Prepare people to move into other roles? Is marketing a real path for your agents? Maybe IT or Accounting?
All of those skills and roles are valid, but they’re different, and they should drive different types of coaching and training.
Without that clarity, it’s really hard to connect the investment to an outcome, and when that happens, cost tends to win the conversation.
There’s also just a reality that the return doesn’t show up immediately. You’re investing time now to improve something that plays out over weeks or months. Some organizations are fine with that but others aren’t.
But if the goal is better performance and people who stick around, coaching and training can’t just be something you do when you have time. They have to be something you make time for, even when it’s inconvenient.