Benefits & Limitations Of MiaRec's AI-Powered Individualized Coaching Suggestions For Contact Center Agents

If there is one thing I would have liked to have had in my role as a sales contact manager a few years ago, it would have been the ability to provide my agents with some personalized feedback after every call. Okay, that and Auto QA because manually evaluating agents was a never-ending drag... but I digress. 

I wanted my agents to succeed so badly that it kept me up at night, but no matter how hard I tried, there was only one of me to go around, so I spent most of my time focusing on my bottom performers or agents on a Personal Improvement Plan (PIP).

I wish I could have had more time to focus more on the middle-tier agents because those agents make or break a contact center sales team. They are the ones that, given the chance and good coaching, would improve their performance. Instead, they rarely got individualized coaching suggestions, resulting in stagnation of their performance, frustration, and eventually their leaving.

Automated coaching suggestions could have helped ensure that all my agents received regular feedback. This feature is a game-changer, and if you have ever seen me demo this capability, you know how excited I get about it. However, as awesome and helpful as it can be, it isn't for everyone and has some disadvantages that might cause it to not work for everyone. In this article, I will explain what MiaRec's Areas of Improvement feature is, what it is used for, and what the pros and cons are so you can decide for yourself if this is right for your contact center. 

What Is MiaRec's "Areas of Improvement"?

Before we can dive into the pros and cons of the MiaRec feature called "Areas of Improvements," we need to clarify what we mean by this, as the term refers to different things, depending on which vendor you ask. 

MiaRec's "Areas of Improvement" are AI-extracted insights specifically dedicated to providing your agents with personalized feedback and coaching suggestions after every single call. In other words, after the call has ended, MiaRec's Generative AI will automatically analyze the transcript of the call recording to look for areas the agent could improve upon, e.g., identify missed opportunities, ways to improve service quality, and much more. Because MiaRec uses Generative AI with advanced contextual understanding for this, every coaching suggestion is highly individualized and within the context of that specific call. 

How does MiaRec's "Areas of Improvements" Work?

Because you are using natural language to tell the AI exactly what you are looking for, you can specify what good looks like and how you would like the response formatted (e.g., 3 bullet points). You can also give it additional instructions such as "Use an empathetic tone and encouragement."

Image: The "Areas of Improvement" section within the MiaRec Auto QA platform provides actionable feedback on professionalism, accuracy, and communication to enhance agent performance and customer experience.

Pros of MiaRec's "Areas of Improvement" Coaching Feature

MiaRec's personalized coaching suggestion feature offers a lot of advantages. These include:

• It is unbiased. I hate to admit it, but every human QA manager is a little biased, whether they would admit it or not. AI provides consistent and unbiased feedback regardless of the agent's background story or personality.
• It is scalable. It is impossible to manually provide coaching suggestions or personalized feedback after every single call to every single agent. However, AI can provide individualized feedback on every call, making it highly scalable. 
• It provides feedback within the context of the conversation. The AI can give call-specific feedback and suggestions because it has a full contextual understanding of each call. You can even give it clear guidelines as to what good looks like.
• It is customizable. Every contact center has specific nuances they would like to focus on regarding sales performance and service quality. Using the MiaRec prompt designer, you can customize your prompts, which allows you to hone in on specific behaviors, scripts, or training you would like to reinforce with your agents.
• It can track training effectiveness. You can use "Areas for Improvement" to specifically track whether agents are properly implementing new training or skills that have been taught. This provides a way to quantify the impact of training programs.
• It helps with gamification. The "Areas of Improvement" data could potentially be used to gamify agent performance, with rewards or recognition for agents who show consistent improvement in the AI-identified areas.
• It can help identify top performers. In addition to focusing on areas that need improvement, the AI could also be used to identify agents who are excelling, allowing managers to study their best practices.

Image: This screenshot shows a customizable "Areas of Improvement" prompt from the MiaRec application, designed to guide users in evaluating agent performance and providing tailored feedback to meet specific business needs.

Cons of MiaRec's "Areas of Improvement" Coaching Feature

However, there are also some potential negatives.

• Lack of Historical Context: The AI currently only looks at the individual call and doesn't aggregate or consider the agent's previous call history and feedback. This can lead to repetitive or redundant suggestions.
• Potential for Irrelevant Suggestions: There is a concern that the AI may sometimes provide suggestions simply because it is expected to, even if the call was actually good. This means the validity of the feedback has to be manually verified.
• Potential Information Overload: Providing agents with areas of improvement after every call could potentially be overwhelming, especially if the feedback is repetitive. Timing the review to be at the start/end of the day might be better.
• Is Not Meant For Aggregating Feedback Across Agents: Right now, there is no easy way for managers to quickly aggregate the areas of improvement across a team of agents. Reviewing each agent's feedback individually would be a very time-consuming, manual process.

The last point, as pointed out in the beginning of the article, is by design, although it would be useful to get aggregated coaching suggestions across all or some of your agents, for example to deleop training. However, this can be addressed with Auto QA. In contract to "Areas of Improvements," MiaRec's Auto QA provides the aggregated report for many calls rather than a feedback on the individual call and focuses on well defined metrics, which are measurable, while the Area of Improvement is a free-text feedback. You can use both capabilities in conjunction to get a very powerful way to provide coaching to your agents.

It is also important to point out that the capabilities of AI evolve at a rapid pace and to paraphrase the brilliant Ethan Mollick, "the AI you are using today will be the worst AI you will ever use."

Tips On How To Use "Areas of Improvement"

Last but not least, I want to share a few tips on how to use this feature in the most effective way.

• Review coaching suggestions each morning. Have your agents review coaching suggestions from yesterday's calls rather than after every call. This keeps the feedback fresh in their minds before they start taking calls.

• If needed, supplement with an end-of-the-day review.  If your agents handle a lot of calls, it might be best to review five coaching suggestions at the end of the day and another 5-10 in the morning to reinforce the areas they need to focus on.

• Analyze the coaching suggestions yourself. As a manager, I suggest you also thoroughly review the coaching suggestions data, looking for trends across agents. This could help identify common areas needing improvement or opportunities for team-wide training.

• Highlight certain suggestions in meetings. Bring some of the key coaching suggestions to team meetings, both to discuss areas needing work and (this is equally important) to highlight agents who are excelling in certain areas.

• Use coaching suggestions to identify training opportunities. Your analysis of the coaching suggestions could be very valuable for designing targeted training programs to address the most common agent development needs.

• Consider opportunities for gamification. Gamification is very effective in keeping agents involved and engaged. Look for ways to use these coaching suggestions for gamification. You could even start simply with having agents earn badges or rewards. 

I hope you find this article useful and that it inspires you to start using "Areas of Improvement" in your contact center. If you aren't a MiaRec customer yet and haven't had a personalized demo, I highly encourage you to schedule yours today. I would be honored to show you how it works in person and provide some ways you could use it in your specific contact center situation.