In recent years, the fields of learning design and employee coaching have been revolutionized, with technology playing a major role in enabling long-standing principles of education to be applied for better-than-ever business results.
Consider personalization: Great teachers have always recognized that different students have different learning styles, paces and strengths. Some students may absorb detailed material in a single pass, while others may need to review complex material a number of times. In many situations, however, time and staffing limit the degree to which curricula and their delivery can be personalized to meet the needs of different trainees.
Likewise, professional trainers have long known that providing timely and relevant feedback reinforces learning, increases engagement and fosters continuous improvement. But until recently, it has been tough to do so promptly and objectively, especially at scale.
Coaching, Transformed
Thanks to modern technologies – the web, video tools, interactive gaming – that has all changed. Interactive learning applications are designed to address specific learning challenges that individuals encounter. They empower each individual to progress at their own pace, with instant feedback at every step.
Today it’s hard to imagine coaching for sports or public speaking without the real-life recordings that allow coaches and individuals to vastly improve performance by watching to see what works well and what must be improved.
Business coaching has followed a similar path. For many customer-facing organizations, agent performance is a critical success factor. Coaching is particularly crucial for agents in highly regulated industries, when going off-script could result in significant compliance and litigation risk.
For Debt Collection, Coaching Makes All the Difference
Among the numerous organizations that require well-trained agents, debt collection operations are perhaps the most dependent on their agents’ skill – and at greatest risk if they are not optimally trained. An effective training program for debt collection agents must achieve three primary goals. It should:
- Ensure that agents have full command of compliance obligations to minimize risk
- Improve agents’ communications and rhetorical skills to increase Promise To Pay (PTP) rates
- Coach agents in developing the empathy and psychological fortitude to handle potentially unpleasant situations such as delinquencies, while training them to interact respectfully and effectively with vulnerable people
Fortunately, today a new generation of coaching tools leverages advanced training techniques to meet the unique challenges of ARM industry businesses. How can your organization choose the right one for its particular needs?
Selecting a Coaching System
Is it video-assisted?
According to research, learners are likely to remember 10% of the material they read, 65% of visual content – and a full 95% of content they learn from audio-visual presentations. Because video holds learners’ attention to an extent that other media can’t match, video-assisted coaching is an effective independent learning tool for remote worker onboarding.
Does the coaching system integrate with your monitoring system?
Seamless integration between coaching and monitoring systems creates valuable synergies. Based on monitoring data covering each individual’s challenges, an integrated coaching system can tailor bespoke paths that address each agent’s needs, and provide on-target feedback and encouragement.
How quick is the feedback cycle?
At today’s hyper-efficient call centers, any delay in providing feedback about a specific incident means that an agent may conduct numerous additional high-risk or low-performing conversations before being set straight. In addition, when a misstep is only addressed after days or weeks, incident details have faded from memory and feedback effectiveness is diminished. Look for a solution that flags challenges in real time to increase the speed and impact of feedback and reduce repeat offenses.
How easily can managers share the problematic instances with the agent?
QC managers’ days are already filled with tedious tasks. Manually cutting flagged instances and sharing them with relevant agents shouldn’t add to their load. Instead, chose a system that automatically extracts audio snippets of problematic interactions and shares them with the right recipient to save time and reduce management burden.
Can coaching progress be tracked?
Look for a coaching solution that lets you easily monitor and document coaching progress on multiple levels – individual, team and full center operations.
Does the solution include a library of ARM-specific coaching?
Between onboarding new employees and keeping existing agents up-to-date, coaches usually have their hands full. Make sure that the solution you choose comes with a library of videos that cover compliance guidelines relevant for the ARM industry. With the basics covered, you can focus your scarce time on adding agency-specific guidelines.
Coaching, the Sedric Way
For collection operations, excellent coaching is an essential factor for success. Video-assisted, personalized solutions can drive revenues by improving agent performance and reducing risk and legal costs.
That’s why we built a coaching module into the Sedric platform. Data on errors, violations and missed opportunities that is gathered during the AI-based monitoring process flows seamlessly to our training engine, which tailors individual coaching paths to address each agent’s needs. A library of bite-sized videos that engagingly explain FTCPA rules comes with the system, and coaches can easily create additional videos using avatars of their choice. Dashboards make it simple for coaches and leaders to follow up on process, with coaching and remediation efforts automatically documented for audit trails.
New technologies make coaching more engaging, impactful and effective than ever before. Integrating these technologies with communications and compliance monitoring systems creates a virtuous cycle of feedback-driven improvement that empowers savvy ARM industry businesses to pull ahead of the pack. Isn’t it time that your organization started enjoying the competitive advantages that coaching technology integration can bring?
In recent years, the fields of learning design and employee coaching have been revolutionized, with technology playing a major role in enabling long-standing principles of education to be applied for better-than-ever business results.
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