Even though call center agent coaching is the part of a contact center manager’s job that most directly improves their team, it’s often the part that’s cancelled first when the queue gets busy.
This guide is written for contact center supervisors and operations managers using Microsoft Teams.
Table of contents
- What Is Call Center Agent Coaching, and How Is It Different from Training?
- When Should Call Center Agent Coaching Happen?
- Which Live Monitoring Tool Should You Use?
- What Should You Say When Using Call Whisper?
- Which Metrics Should Influence Your Coaching Decisions?
- Should You Coach New Hires and Experienced Agents the Same Way?
- What Should Agents Reflect On Before a Coaching Session?
- What Are the Most Common Call Center Coaching Mistakes?
- Call Center Coaching Inside Microsoft Teams
- Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Call Center Agent Coaching, and How Is It Different from Training?
Call center agent coaching is the ongoing, structured practice of helping agents improve through observation, feedback, and goal setting.
Training and quality assurance are related but distinct.
- Training gives agents foundational knowledge like product information, call scripts, and system navigation.
- QA evaluates whether agents are meeting performance standards.
Coaching is often mistakenly treated as QA: something that happens after a failure like a call with an angry client, or an escalation that could have been resolved by a junior agent with better training.
When Should Call Center Agent Coaching Happen?
Most supervisors think of coaching as a scheduled 1-on-1 event that usually gets pushed to next week. But coaching should happen three different times, and the scheduled 1-on-1 is only one of them.
Before the Call
Pre-call coaching involves reviewing data before a coaching conversation so you’re working from facts instead of impressions. Pull an agent’s call history from the relevant reports, look at their timeline to see availability patterns, queue sign-in compliance, and how their talk time distributes across the day. Review a handful of recent recordings or transcripts.
This prep will help you to:
- Make the coaching conversation specific. Saying “your AHT on queue calls has been running 20% above the team average for the past two weeks” is more productive than saying “you seem to be spending a long time on calls.”
- Coach all agents, not just the ones visibly struggling.
Many of your service quality problems are addressable through coaching, but only if you know which agents are making which errors.
During the Call
Live call monitoring tools let you intervene when the stakes are highest, and the feedback is most immediate. In-call coaching is a safety net for new agents, a quality signal for experienced ones, and a way to prevent a deteriorating call from becoming a complaint. More on the specific tools below.
After the Call
Post-call coaching is the structured review. You’ve listened to a recording, reviewed the transcript, noted specific moments. Now you sit with the agent and work through what happened and why.
When schedules are busy or pressure towards other priorities is high, these tend to get ignored. However, this regular coaching produces a compounding affect on agent improvement.
Which Live Monitoring Tool Should You Use?
Contact centers commonly give supervisors three live monitoring tools, each suited to different situations.
| Situation | Tool | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You want to observe a new agent’s call patterns without influencing the call | Listen In | You’re invisible to both parties. Best for quality observation and learning the agent’s patterns before you give feedback. |
| A call is going sideways and the agent needs a cue, not a co-pilot | Whisper In | Only the agent hears you. You can guide without the caller knowing. Low disruption, high impact. |
| An agent is overwhelmed and the caller needs to hear a manager | Barge In | You become a full participant. Use when the situation has escalated beyond what a whisper cue can fix. |
For a detailed walkthrough of call whisper specifically, including when and how to use it during agent onboarding, see our post on using call whisper to improve contact center performance.
What Should You Say When Using Call Whisper?
The guiding principle is brevity. Your agent is holding a conversation with a customer while processing what you’re saying.
Effective whisper cues are short, specific, and actionable:
- “Account number” (a reminder to ask for something they forgot)
- “Slow down” (a tone cue for an agent who’s rushing)
- “Transfer to billing” (a routing decision the agent wasn’t sure about)
- “Two minutes, then offer callback” (a time guidance cue for a long hold)
The whisper post linked above goes deeper on this, including best practices for when to intervene versus when to stay silent and let the agent work through it.
Which Metrics Should Influence Your Coaching Decisions?
First-Call Resolution: The percentage of calls resolved without requiring a callback or transfer. Agents consistently below your team average on FCR are the first candidates for focused coaching on resolution skills and product knowledge. This is the most important metric for coaching prioritization.
Average Handle Time: Total talk time plus hold time plus after-call work. AHT significantly higher than average points to call control issues, knowledge gaps, or wrap-up inefficiency. However, significantly lower AHT also may need attention, because rushing through calls is not efficient.
Availability and Queue Sign-In Compliance: A live agent report shows exactly when agents are signed in, when they’re on calls, and their status changes throughout the day. Some examples of patterns worth coaching are agents who sign out early, show unexplained availability gaps, or consistently have longer wrap-up times than peers.
Call Sentiment Trends: Live sentiment analysis shows calls that are currently becoming negative. Reviewing an agent’s sentiment data over a period of time gives you a picture of their emotional tone consistency.
For a broader look at the contact center KPIs worth tracking at the team level, see our guide to call center KPIs and optimized operations.
Should You Coach New Hires and Experienced Agents the Same Way?
No. Treating them the same wastes both your time and theirs.
New hires: The goal is acceleration and confidence-building. Use Listen In heavily during this period. Sit on calls regularly without intervening so you understand their patterns before you start coaching them.
Use Whisper proactively. A new agent who hears “good, offer the callback now” gets positive reinforcement in the moment it’s most useful. Keep 1-on-1’s frequent and short, and focus on one or two behaviors per session, not a full performance review.
Experienced agents: The goal is performance optimization and re-engagement. Experienced agents who are underperforming often already know where they’re struggling, and self-assessment before feedback creates better reflection than top-down evaluation.
What Should Agents Reflect On Before a Coaching Session?
Send these questions to the agent before your next 1-on-1 and ask them to come prepared.
- Pick a recent call you felt good about. What specifically did you do well?
- Pick a recent call that didn’t go the way you wanted. What would you do differently?
- What’s the most common type of call you find challenging right now?
- What’s one thing that would help you handle calls more effectively?
- What are you working on improving from our last conversation?
What Are the Most Common Call Center Coaching Mistakes?
Coaching only poor performers. High performers benefit from coaching too. When you only pull people into coaching conversations after something goes wrong, you’ve defined coaching as a punishment.
Coaching without data. “I just had a feeling about that call” is not a coaching anchor. Specific clips, timestamps, and metrics make feedback actionable.
Skipping the in-call moment. Post-call review is valuable, but an agent who gets a timely whisper cue during a difficult call learns faster than one who hears about it in a meeting two days later.
Making coaching feel punitive. Agents who dread coaching conversations go into them defensive. The goal is a conversation the agent is present for, not one they’re bracing against.
For more on building a quality assurance process that feeds into coaching, see our post on improving call center quality assurance.
Call Center Coaching Inside Microsoft Teams
Every tool described in this guide is available inside Landis Contact Center for Microsoft Teams, without requiring a separate platform, a new application to learn, or a context switch for supervisors or agents.
If you’re managing a Microsoft Teams contact center and want to see what this looks like in your environment, you can book a demo of Landis Contact Center and we’ll walk through the supervisor workflow with you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Call center agent coaching is the ongoing practice of helping agents improve performance through regular feedback, observation, and goal setting. It’s distinct from initial training and from quality assurance review, though all three work together.
Frequent short sessions outperform infrequent long ones. For new agents, brief weekly check-ins in the first 30–60 days build strong habits. For experienced agents, bi-weekly or monthly 1-on-1s anchored in data keep performance moving. In-call coaching through live monitoring happens as needed, not on a schedule.
Call monitoring is listening to calls to assess performance or identify patterns. Coaching is the action that follows: the conversation, the feedback, the goal-setting. Monitoring without coaching is data collection. Coaching without monitoring is guesswork. They work together.
Start with data, not impressions. Pull their call history, identify the specific patterns driving the struggles, and build the coaching conversation around two or three concrete behaviors rather than overall performance. Ask them to self-assess first. Use recordings to show, not just tell. Set a narrow, measurable goal for the next two weeks and follow up.
Main tools include live call monitoring (listen-in, whisper, barge), call recording, performance analytics, and real-time sentiment analysis. In a Microsoft Teams environment, Landis Contact Center provides all of these within the Teams interface.
Book a demo of Landis Contact Center to see call center agent coaching tools available.
