Call center supervisors are responsible for coaching their agents. As part of the Cogito experience, I generated conceptual designs around how to make coaching a collaborative experience.
Understand
Through interviews with call center supervisors, we learned that the supervisors focus on the “Magic Middle” or the mid level performers. Supervisors felt if they could help these agents improve their performance they would get the biggest bang for their buck.
The other group Supervisors focused on were low performers. Low performers were coached much more frequently and there was an emphasis on documentation since there was a significant possibility that the agent would be let go.
The most significant challenges supervisors face is identifying calls that are appropriate to coach on. Currently it is a hit or miss. process. Also, it is not always clear what behaviors an agent should focus on.
On the other side, the agent frequently feels as if the coaching session is one way and is not collaborative.
Concepts
I developed concepts that focused on user stories such as:
- As a Supervisor, I want to the system to recommend what content I should use to coach my agents so I can provide more focused and effective coaching.
- As an Agent, I would like to be able to review the coaching information prior to the coaching session so I can be prepared to ask questions.I also want to be able to make suggestions about topics or content to review.
- As a Supervisor and Agent, I want to have a tool that can be used during our coaching session to make the session collaborative.
- As a Supervisor, I want the system to capture the outcome of the coaching sessions so the session is well documented for future reference.
Based on these user stories, I designed a Supervisor experience and an Agent experience.
