12 Essential Coaching Tools for Support Teams

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According to a Khoros survey, 83% of customers feel more loyal to brands that respond to and resolve their complaints. That’s why an effective support team is critical to the success of your organization, and it’s vital that your support teams receive efficient coaching to achieve this. 

Coaching strategies and the technology that supports them are evolving at an accelerated pace, with the arrival of AI contributing to huge change. It’s important to keep on top of these shifting trends, making smart use of technology to deliver more effective coaching, and helping to ensure your support agents are equipped to provide the best possible customer experience. 

Read on, as we take a look at some of the most essential tools in support coaching, and how harnessing them will enable you to create stronger teams and customer relationships. 

Rapid Insights and Analytics have Arrived

Taking a deep dive into what your support team members are doing right and wrong has traditionally been a time-consuming process. Until now, understanding how your teams are performing would involve going back through calls, listening to interactions, and highlighting specific learnings manually. 

Faced with countless hours of calls to go through, you could easily miss key learnings that could help your support team members to grow and develop. Thankfully, software tools are rapidly evolving, enabling you as a manager to not just examine team performance in more detail than ever before, but receive detailed analytics and easily provide coaching in real-time.

That's why one of the key trends for coaching support this year is all about using customer insights and analytics to deliver a better customer experience. Organizations that take advantage of the latest tools and features will unearth findings that can help them continuously improve their support team coaching, and in turn, build a stronger team.

Tools that can help you get on top of this trend and build a data-led coaching approach for your support team—without losing hours of time gathering insights—include:  

Transcription tools

Transcription tools can make a huge difference in coaching your support teams, not only helping you to save huge amounts of time when it comes to writing up calls but also helping to drill down into the finer details of customer interactions. 

What are your support agents doing best? Where are they winning over customers? Are they sticking to the right scripts and messages? Is there anything they can do better? These are all questions that the latest AI-powered transcription tools can help with, letting you quickly identify insights, such as which conversations went perfectly to plan, along with areas where support agents could benefit from additional coaching or training. 

Here are three of the best options: 

• Aircall Call and Voicemail Transcription 

  Aircall’s AI-based transcription services are an integral part of Aircall’s business phone solution. Using the power of AI, it can transcribe at a rate of nine seconds per minute of audio, saving your teams huge amounts of time. Those notes can be used to deliver better training experiences using real-world scenarios, or to identify learnings from customer interactions. On top of that, it integrates with key tools like your CRM, meaning less time is spent inputting notes on calls, and more time can be invested in building customer relationships. 
  

• Transkriptor

  Powered by an AI algorithm, Transkriptor claims 99% accuracy depending on language and audio quality. It learns speech patterns, with accuracy improving over time, and creates draft text automatically.
  

• Wordly AI-Powered Interpretation

  Wordly’s AI-powered translation can translate speech into audio and captions for 25+ languages without the need for human interpreters. It includes video translation, video subtitles, document translation, audio translation, and transcription. 

Analytics tools 

Transcription tools may take the pain out of writing up calls, giving you easy access to a hard copy of entire conversations, but they don’t tell the entire story. Analytics tools fill the gaps, providing the stats you need to see where your agents have excelled or struggled, helping to highlight the conversations your support team can really benefit from. 

Analytics tools can highlight unusual activity, such as longer calls, which can often mean more difficult customer challenges. You can also unearth insights such as missed call rates, waiting times, and more. With all of these data points, you can tap into the insight-based coaching trend, and target your training and mentorship to the areas where it will make a real difference. 

Here are three of the best options: 

• Aircall Call Center Analytics

  Call center analytics make a huge difference when it comes to coaching your support team, with Aircall’s business phone system including a comprehensive analytics suite, providing a complete picture of your team’s performance and how you can improve the customer experience.
  

• Plecto

  Plecto is a customizable visualization tool delivering real-time insights into your most important business KPI’s. This integration enables you to engage and motivate employees to take responsibility for individual, team, and company performance. 
  

• CallRail 

  Serving more than 200,000 businesses and integrating with leading marketing and sales software, CallRail’s analytics and business communications solutions deliver real-time insights for customers, helping to understand where coaching will be most effective. 

Back to Basics: Focusing on Relationships, not Admin

Today, customers expect brands to build meaningful relationships with them. They want to understand your values and receive a personalized experience. 

To deliver on that expectation, customer support agents need to be able to focus on nurturing those connections with customers. And that means they can't get bogged down in admin. That's why another key trend for support agents is reducing admin and gaining time to get back to the basics: building great relationships with customers.

Effective coaching means you need to have the scope to provide a more personalized experience for reps and consumers alike. The latest tools can make a huge difference when it comes to coaching for support roles, enabling managers to steer ongoing conversations without interrupting the flow of the conversation or putting in place a separate training session.

Tools that can help you get on top of this trend and transform coaching for your support team include:  

Call monitoring and logging software

Call monitoring software can be a powerful tool to enable you to listen to customer-facing calls in real time and chip in to help junior agents where needed. It reveals where your support teams are getting things right, along with the challenges they face when dealing with customers. By using features such as Call Whispering, which allows you to coach another team member in real-time without the customer being aware, you can team up on high-priority calls to help employees find practical solutions for stressful scenarios. 

Embracing the back-to-basics trend in support coaching is all about recognizing support coaching doesn’t have to be separate from your daily work. It can integrate with your current workflows—and with call monitoring software, you can easily find coaching moments during the regular working day. 

Here are three of the best options: 

• Aircall Call Monitoring 

  Aircall’s call monitoring feature makes it possible to view any call your employees are on, listen in, and even offer advice to your agents without disrupting the flow of the conversation. This makes coaching a breeze. 
  

• Provana Speech Analytics 

  Provana speech analytics offers a speech analytics platform that automatically monitors and objectively scores your calls, with metrics including target calls per day, actual calls per day, and average wrap-up times, providing insights into which calls to focus on.
  

• Re:amaze

  Re:amaze makes it easy to manage all customer interactions in one place, logging calls for any conversation and automating workflows. Along with making life easier for support teams, features such as call logging are also beneficial for coaching. 

Help desk integrations

Help desk integrations are another key area that can transform coaching within your business, making it easier for your teams to centralize phone, SMS, and chat communication in one place, track call activity, and add data and context to phone conversations. With all of this information in one place, agents can easily identify and share learnings about customers. 

This helps to create additional transparency for your support team, further highlighting customer interactions that could benefit from additional coaching while also enabling more experienced agents to pass on vital information to new hires. 

Here are three of the best options: 

• Hiver
  With Aircall’s Hiver integration, your support team can keep tabs on conversations faster by viewing context-rich information including Aircall tags, notes, and recordings/voicemails on Hiver. 
  

• Intercom
  Using Aircall’s Intercom integration, your business can consolidate caller information into one place and streamline the way support teams talk with their customers. That’s not only better for business, it’s easier to identify trends and areas where coaching would be most beneficial.
  

• Zoho Desk

  Aircall’s Zoho Desk integration makes it easy to sync Aircall tags to identify patterns or to automate reporting and workflows. There’s no manual data entry needed, meaning all the information you require to identify areas for improvement are already logged. 

Keeping Your Customers Happy

By embracing the tools above, using analytics and the insights they provide, along with technologies that can save time or free up resources when it comes to coaching your support team, it’s easier to provide more effective coaching. 

Whether you’re simply looking to onboard new teammates, or want to help your existing team to grow and develop, keeping on top of the latest trends and the technology that supports them will help you to build stronger relationships and ensure your customers are happy. 

Ready to take your support team to the next level? Download our free skills template today to get started.

Published on June 6, 2023.