There’s a belief in most contact centers that coaching is happening. Team leaders have their 1-2-1s. Managers track sessions on spreadsheets. HR can point to a cadence. On paper, the process exists. It’s working, right?
Not exactly. In most contact centers, the coaching conversations that actually happen look almost nothing like the coaching conversations that could happen.
Not because team leaders don’t care, but rather because other pressures make it genuinely hard to do it well.
The gap between data and the coaching room
Your contact center generates an extraordinary amount of performance data. AutoQA scores every interaction. Sentiment analysis surfaces how agents and customers are feeling across hundreds of calls. Scorecards track the specific behaviors that drive quality.
All of that data exists. But we’re willing to bet most of it never makes it into a coaching conversation.
Why? Because the team leader who walks into a 1-2-1 at 2pm on a Thursday has spent the morning managing an escalation, covering a gap in the rota, and trying to keep their own metrics green. By the time the coaching session comes around, preparation means a rushed scan of recent evaluations – if that.
The result is coaching that’s generic where it should be specific.
Meanwhile, the insight that would change that conversation – recurring themes across dozens of calls, a sentiment pattern that’s been building for three weeks, the three specific moments where an agent’s approach is costing them – sits buried in the platform. Technically accessible, but practically… invisible.
This is where agent performance really gets impacted. Development and constructive feedback is important, but it’s simply not being prioritized.
What good coaching preparation actually requires
Let’s imagine a well-prepared coaching session.
A team leader who knows, before they sit down, the two or three most important development themes for that agent. They can reference specific calls and point to patterns, and they’re ready to have a real conversation, not reconstruct one from memory.
That preparation, done manually, takes time that most team leaders simply don’t have. One of our customers estimated 30–45 minutes of prep time per agent, per session. Multiply that across a team of 15 and a monthly cadence, and you’re talking about hours of work just to be ready to coach effectively.
So preparation suffers – or the session happens without it – and both the team leader and the agent leave knowing that it could all be so much better.
Introducing AI Coaching
AI Coaching is a new feature inside evaluagent, built exactly for this moment.
Before a coaching session, a team leader selects the agent and a date range, and AI Coaching generates a structured performance brief in seconds. They get a focused, ready-to-use summary of what matters most for that agent, including:
- The strongest and weakest behaviors, surfaced from across every evaluated interaction
- Conversation insights – sentiment, resolution rate, xNPS, handling time.
- Specific coaching talking points, with direct links to the call recordings they’re based on.
Additionally, it also carries context from previous sessions, so you can keep track of what the agent was working on, and whether it’s moving in the right direction.
All without having to manually analyze a month’s worth of evaluations.
What happened when real customers used it
We ran a closed beta with three contact centers with different sectors, operational models and team sizes.
The feedback was consistent:
- Up to 45 minutes of prep time saved per agent
- Easily able to identify recurrent themes, previously missed
- Accessible – multiple coaches at different clients discovered the feature independently and started using it without being prompted
That last one isn’t a metric, but we’re delighted that the feature was picked up without instruction, and found its mark immediately.
All three clients are building AI Coaching into their standard operational workflows. One of the Quality and Coaching Leads put it simply: “This is a game changer.”
The agent coaching problem is solvable
The data that could transform your coaching conversations already exists. AI Coaching by evaluagent means your team leaders can now get to it, in the right format, at the right moment.
Because the team leaders who walk into coaching sessions prepared don’t just have better conversations. They have conversations that actually change things for the better.
See AI Coaching in action
See how automation features like AI Coaching can bring efficiency and performance to your contact center. Book a demo with the team today.
