Leading People Is Coaching, Not Checking Up

Rob Cramer · 3 min read

Every contact centre I’ve worked in had more dashboards than it knew what to do with. Metrics are useful — I live by them. But a dashboard has never made an agent better at their job. Coaching has. The difference between the two is the difference between checking up on people and actually leading them.

Checking up is easy. That’s the problem.

Checking up looks like this: pull the report, spot the red number, send the message. “Your numbers are down this week.” The agent already knows. What they don’t know is what to do differently on the next call — and a spreadsheet was never going to tell them.

Coaching is slower and less tidy. You sit beside the agent — side-by-side, on live calls and chats. You listen in real time. You review calls together, with QA feedback, while the interaction is still fresh enough to learn from. You ask questions instead of handing down verdicts, because an agent who figures out the answer owns it in a way an agent who was told never will.

What that looked like at Shaw

A retention agent on my team was well below the rest of the team on retained revenue. The checking-up response would have been a warning and a target. Instead, I looked at what was actually happening on their calls — and the tell was in the data: their handle time was very low. They weren’t failing because they couldn’t sell the save. They were rushing. Call after call, they moved so fast they never found out why the customer wanted to cancel in the first place.

So we changed the behaviour, not just the target. Three open-ended questions on every call — no exceptions. Live coaching, side-by-side. Call reviews, together. And I set one expectation that mattered as much as the questions: not every customer can be saved. That took the pressure off, and the conversations got better — slower, curious, actually about the customer’s problem.

Their retained revenue improved markedly. And it kept improving, because the skill underneath it — find the real reason before you pitch the fix — transfers to every call that comes after.

It works the same way off the floor

At LinkNow, I mentor and train the people around me, and when I spotted gaps in how new Client Advocacy staff were being onboarded, I rebuilt the training program from the ground up. That’s the same instinct as the Shaw story: when someone is struggling, don’t start by questioning the person. Start by asking what they were given to work with — the coaching, the training, the process — and fix that first.