Coaching Best Practices – Revinate Help Center

Analyzing Scores and Coaching Sessions

The goal of scoring and coaching is to improve individual agent’s inbound call conversion and sales skills. In fact, there is a direct correlation between average call scores and flat conversion rates. By monitoring progress on a weekly basis, you can determine if your coaching techniques are working or not and adjust accordingly. As you see positive results, reward the progress. Conversely, if you see an agent heading in the wrong direction, immediately act. There are numerous Revinate resources available to you to help track your coaching sessions and monitor individual and team performance. The Scoreboard Report, the KPI Report are two recommended resources that give a detailed overview of your team’s activity and progress toward goals.

Why Coach?

Scoring calls is one thing. Knowing how to use this information to increase the performance and productivity of staff members is another. This is the driving force behind effective coaching.

Coaching can be defined simply as the process of motivating change. Effective coaching enables individuals to realize their greater potential by developing the means to achieve it. Effective coaching will reap a multitude of rewards for your organization. Employees will begin to develop a sense of ownership and belonging as they understand their critical contributions to the company’s goals. When employees feel connected to the greater goal, have a clear understanding what is expected of them, and believe they are appreciated and fairly rewarded for their work, the result is a healthy sales culture with increased buy-in and less turnover.

We recommend meeting with agents twice a month, and more often with new hires or agents who may be performing at the bottom third of your team who take a larger percentage of calls. Additional adhoc meetings may occur based on error or any other issues that require immediate attention. The Revinate Weekly KPI report will help you identify which agents need more coaching based on individual conversion rates and other key metrics.

Coaching sessions can be a mix of quick “Stand Up” sessions as well as more formalized meetings depending on the agent’s performance. The recommended minimum number of lead calls to score is 5 per agent, per coaching session, or 10 per month. This is to ensure that you have a large enough sample size to make assumptions about behaviors that need to be corrected.

Tracking Coaching Sessions

Coaching sessions and goals can be recorded in the Reservation Sales Suite within the Coaching Sessions Module, they are available, on demand, for management and agents. Once the initial Coaching Sessions has been created, setting goals based on your scoring criteria, future sessions will display not only current goals, but previous goals and notes as well to reveal patterns and progress. Up to twenty-six sessions can be captured within the coaching module, enough for a year’s worth of data, coaching every two weeks. The ability to easily access historic coaching sessions give your reservation manager, as well as agents, visibility into documented goals and progress for reference and, if necessary, disciplinary purposes.

Both the Coaching Sessions and My Coaching Goals tools work together to provide greater clarity and support for positive, measurable change. Your Customer Success Manager can assist you with setting up and tracking coaching sessions. The Revinate Knowledge Base offers access to additional information to help you set up coaching sessions, more effectively coach and better analyze your reservations data to set attainable goals for your team. The “Comprehensive Guide to The Reservation Sales Suite Reports” offers detailed information on all The Reservation Sales Suite reports including those that provide coaching data.

Effective One-to-One Coaching Session

Preparation for your coaching session:

Prior to your coaching session, score a minimum of 5 calls. This is necessary to determine behavioral patterns in your agents’ performance. If you are not able to identity your agent’s challenges by scoring 5 calls, then more may be necessary.
These must be calls that are dated after your last coaching session in order for them to be captured in the current coaching session as well as to hopefully show change in their behavior.
Schedule coaching sessions at a regular day and time every two weeks with your agents. This gives you structure timeline for scoring calls and gives your agents the expectation that they are being consistently monitored and coached.

During each coaching session:

Review the specific goals from your last coaching session. Was the agent able to achieve these goals? If not, why not?
Listen to one good call and one opportunity call together. If you don’t have specific calls picked out, you can use the top scored call and the bottom scored call. Ask your agents what was good and what can be improved in each call before you offer your feedback. This step can help you to learn more about how your agent perceives their own performance. It’s common to discover that an agent does not hear their own errors.
Record goals with your agent for the next coaching session. Goals should always be reasonable and attainable. Pick one or two items to focus on between coaching sessions. Goals should be SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely.
Use the Keep, Stop, Start format of coaching:

KEEP this Behavior

Reinforce the behavior that is being applied correctly by the agent. Strengthen the performance.

STOP this Behavior

Clearly outline the behavior that is being applied incorrectly by the agent. Eliminate the performance.

START this Behavior

Identify the desired behavior that will be applied by the agent. Begin the new performance.

Peer-to-Peer Coaching

This technique involves your reservations team meeting once per week and scoring a call of your choice for each agent. Use good calls that demonstrate the mastery of the Revinate Non-Negotiables, never “bad” calls as this could be detrimental to your team’s morale. You as the manager can “moderate” the session but should not participate in the peer-to-peer coaching. This will help to foster a supportive environment so your team can help each other develop their skills. This also allows skilled agents within your reservations team to shine and contribute in a way that is visible to all, while nurturing a spirit of competitive-cooperation that is critical to a healthy sales culture. These leaders within your reservations team can also provide effective over the shoulder “spot coaching” to lesser skilled agents when everyone is clear that helping one another in the spirit of positive “coop-etition” benefits all. This further ensures that your team understands what coaching is all about, so that you don’t have to constantly reinforce the importance of coaching. You want your agents to be result oriented vs. problem oriented and willingness to be coached is a means to that end.

Group Coaching

This can be a successful technique when you need to share information among all your agents. It’s less about performance and more about addressing issues at the group level instead of at the individual level. It can consist of information sharing, a quick training session or a department Stand-up meeting.