You've had the conversation. Maybe even twice. You sat the agent down, you were clear, or at least you thought you were, and you walked away believing something would change.
It didn't.
So, you start building a story. Maybe they're not coachable. Maybe they don't care. Maybe this is just who they are. The story is always about them, and it always ends in the same place: a people problem you can't seem to fix.
Here's the uncomfortable part. In most cases, it was never a people problem. It was an expectation problem. And you created it.
The thing nobody wants to hear
When performance doesn't change after a coaching conversation, the easy explanation is the agent. The harder one is the expectation we set, or didn't.
"Be more empathetic on your calls."
"Tighten up your handle time."
"I need you to take more ownership."
These feel like coaching. It sounds specific in our heads - however, the agent walks away and acts on their best guess at what we meant because a guess is all we gave them. Then the next time we listen in, we are disappointed and we tell them they got it wrong.
Sit with that.
The agent acted on the only version they had, and we told them they failed for not reading our minds.
The reason we let it happen is rarely laziness. The vague version is easier. Being specific means committing to a standard out loud and once I've said it out loud, I have to hold it. Vague keeps my options open. Vague feels like kindness.
It isn't.
It just moves the discomfort off my plate and onto the agent's.
"We talked about it" is not "we agreed"
This is the gap I see most often, and it's worth naming on its own.
There's a world of a difference between "we talked about it" and "we agreed, and they're committed." The first one ends when you stop talking. The second one is something the agent can act on when you're not in the room. Most of the conversations we count as coaching are the first kind. We mistake the talking for the agreement.
If you've ever finished a coaching session, feel good about it, but nothing changed, many times this is why.
The conversation happened, but the expectation never transferred. The agent never actually understood what we are truly looking for.
The fix is simpler than the diagnosis
Here's the good news, and the reason I'm giving a whole session to this at ICMI’s Contact Center Expo: closing this gap doesn't take a new performance system, a new tool, or a reorg. It takes three specific moves inside the coaching conversation itself.
I'm not going to lay all three out here. That's what my session is for, but I will tell you the shape of it: the three moves take you from stating an expectation to confirming it landed, so the next conversation starts from clarity instead of "I thought we covered this."
I've been on both sides of this. I've been the leader who delivered the vague feedback and wondered why nothing changed. And I've been the employee told, "this isn't what I needed" without ever having been told what was needed.
Make Your Coaching Stick: The Missing Step Between Feedback and Performance Change on Wednesday, Oct 28 from 11:45am-12:15pm. Register here.