How Real-time Feedback Helps Reinforce Change

The current trend in business, according to Forbes, is to replace the annual performance review with real-time feedback. In fact, 95% of managers are dissatisfied with the formal annual performance review process, according to SHRM, with an increasing number of organizations leaning toward more frequent feedback to drive sustainable improvements.

“Feedback loops are critical for individual and organizational learning,” Shani Harmon and Renee Cullinan wrote in Forbes. “Without them, we cannot improve.”

“Feedback is most meaningful in the moment…. Reinforcing feedback leads to a repetition of the same good behaviors. It also signals to others that you are paying attention and that you acknowledge successes – two great leadership behaviors.”

Incorporating real-time feedback into the coaching and performance management processes builds a culture of transparency and trust. It increases motivation by offering recognition and encouragement, and employees can quickly course-correct. It also provides powerful reinforcement of earlier coaching sessions.

In the contact center, that’s critically important, because customer satisfaction is driven not by the severity of a customer’s issue but rather by agents – specifically, how agents behave toward that customer.

Contact centers invest a lot of time and resources into coaching agents to improve behavior. But agents often struggle during interactions to retain, recall and apply skills learned in coaching sessions. Within one hour, people have forgotten an average of 50% of the information presented in training, according to Learning Solutions Magazine. A day later, they’ve forgotten an average of 70% of new information, and within a week, that number jumps to 90%.

To combat this phenomenon, contact centers are using artificial intelligence (AI) to give agents immediate and accurate feedback in the moment, enabling agents with reinforcement of the skills learned in coaching sessions, thus facilitating faster self-correction. AI is delivering dividends, too: A recent survey by Aberdeen Research found that contact centers using AI are enjoying 3.3 times higher customer retention, 3.5 times more satisfied customers and 2.4 times higher agent productivity.

NICE ENLIGHTEN for Customer Satisfaction with Real-time Interaction Guidance is the first comprehensive AI framework for customer engagement. NICE ENLIGHTEN AI Analytics improve customer satisfaction by interpreting every interaction and transforming subjective agent behaviors into objective insights and guidance –​ immediately, consistently and accurately. NICE ENLIGHTEN provides contact center employees with immediate feedback on how to steer customer conversations with easy to understand prompts and specific recommendations.

Those recommendations focus on the nine specific behaviors identified through the largest omnichannel interaction database in the world and research and development over the course of more than 20 years:

• Demonstrating ownership
• Active listening
• Empathy
• Rapport
• Expectation setting
• Effective questioning
• Promoting self-service
• Inappropriate action
• Acknowledging loyalty

How, though, can contact centers measure these subjective behaviors? Organizations can pay a lot of people to listen to a lot of calls to try to listen for these soft skills, then coach to them. And a lot of contact centers do at least some of this.

The problem is that human listening is not cost-effective or consistent – two people evaluating the same interaction can disagree whether the agent demonstrated rapport, for example.  People reviewing interactions bring their own biases with them. And in the end, agents don’t trust being measured by just a handful of calls each month.  

AI enables contact centers to autoscore these soft skill behaviors on 100% of interactions, both in real time and post-interaction. Automating coaching programs gives coaches and agents alike the information they need to have productive conversations about behaviors, armed with specific examples and how they did and did not demonstrate a specific behavior.

Learn more about how NICE ENLIGHTEN with Real-time Guidance guides agents while an interaction is in progress, giving them the coaching they need in the moment to deliver an exceptional customer experience rather than waiting days or weeks to tell them during a coaching session that they didn’t perform well in an interaction.  An additional recommended solution that works with NICE ENLIGHTEN metrics to help evaluate and identify agent behaviors that need coaching is NICE Quality Central^TM.