How to Become a Better Contact Center Coach

Contact center coaching has a problem. Despite investing countless hours in coaching conversations, quality reviews and development sessions, many leaders feel like they’re not getting anywhere with their agents.

At ICMI Contact Center Expo, Justin Robbins, founder and principal analyst at Metric Sherpa, shared what he’s learned about the best ways to connect with agents.

First, he shared three reasons why coaching programs fail:

• We’re too reactive: Most coaching happens in response to problems — a poor quality score, a customer complaint or a specific incident. “This reactive approach keeps teams constantly fighting fires rather than building capability,” Robbins says.
• We’re ad hoc and inconsistent: When asked who had received formal training on how to coach, less than a third of the room raised their hands. Even fewer had consistent coaching processes across their teams.
• We measure activity, not outcomes: “We feel that measuring the activity of, ‘Hey, did we evaluate this many interactions? Did we have the coaching conversation? We did those things? Okay, good. We’re all done.’” Robbins says. “This is the wrong mentality. The real question isn’t whether coaching happened, but it’s whether it made a difference.”

The Trust Foundation

Before diving into coaching frameworks and models, Robbins talked about something fundamental: trust. He shared an example from his own experience. After consolidating nine contact centers into one — where only the most profitable center’s leaders would keep their jobs — he recognized that employees had “no reason to trust us.”

Rather than jumping straight into coaching conversations, he spent weeks meeting employees for coffee, getting to know them and understanding their concerns.

The lesson?

“The mechanics of coaching are actually really easy,” Robbins says. “The hard work upfront is making sure we create a place where people feel like they are free to fail and that will be OK.”

Coaching as One-on-One Training

Robbins views coaching as “one-on-one training.”

This reframes coaching from something that happens to employees to something that happens for them. He encouraged attendees to think about how to customize coaching for an agent’s career aspirations and personal circumstances.

He shared the story of a college student who joined his team as a temporary summer employee, expecting to become an elementary school teacher in the fall. But when fall rolled around, there weren’t any teaching positions open. She asked to stay. By investing in her development and training, they promoted her into a training role.

The Power of Rhythm and Consistency

One of the biggest credibility-killers in coaching? Inconsistency. When coaching gets canceled due to high call volume or other priorities, it sends a clear message: “Coaching doesn’t matter.”

Instead, Robbins advocates for protected time and multiple types of coaching touchpoints — from quick 30-second acknowledgments to formal development sessions. He shared his “Fast Five” questions for one-on-ones to provide a consistent framework:

• What are you celebrating right now?
• Where are you getting stuck?
• How can I best support you?
• How do you think the team is doing?
• What has to win this week?

These questions shift coaching from problem-focused to future-focused, helping employees see their current role as preparation for what’s next.

The most effective coaches don’t respond to issues, they understand their employees’ needs and build coaching collaboratively to anticipate what’s next. They focus on two fundamental questions every employee asks: “Do I belong?” and “How can I grow?”

“The path forward isn’t about doing more coaching — it’s about doing the right coaching, built on a foundation of trust,” Robbins says.