Agent Coaching Is Broken in Most Service Teams. Here’s Why
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Kehinde Fatosa - 10 min read
Agent coaching is the most neglected performance lever in most service businesses.
And the frustrating part? The data is sitting right there.
Most teams we work with aren’t short on calls. They’re short on visibility into what’s actually happening on those calls. Managers are stretched, seasons are short, and reviewing conversations manually just doesn’t happen at any meaningful scale.
So performance problems go undetected, because no one can see them.
The Assumption That’s Quietly Costing You
Here’s what we see over and over: a business hires for expertise, the team performs well technically, and somewhere along the way everyone assumes phone performance is fine too.
It usually isn’t.
Technical experts, the people who are exceptional at the actual work, aren’t naturally trained communicators. They know the product and they know the process. But when a customer pushes back on price, or gets news they weren’t expecting, or starts to disengage? It’s a different skill set entirely. And without coaching, it doesn’t develop.
The assumption that experience equals phone performance is one of the most expensive assumptions a service business can make.
The Feedback Loop That Only Fires when It’s Too Late
Ask most service managers how they find out a call went badly. The answer is almost always the same: a customer complaint.
That’s a feedback loop that only activates after the damage is done. The conversation is over. The customer is already frustrated. And you’re in damage control mode instead of prevention mode.
At high call volumes, that’s not just a coaching problem. It’s a revenue problem. Conversations are going sideways every day with no one catching them because there’s no system to surface them.
Analyze & Evaluate Calls. At Scale.
Experience Can Actually Make This Worse
This is the part that surprises people.
The longer someone has been doing things a certain way without feedback, the harder those habits are to shift. A team with long tenure and no coaching history isn’t a blank slate, it’s a team that has been quietly reinforcing the same patterns for years.
Bringing in new staff alongside experienced ones makes it worse. Junior people watch senior people and assume that’s how it’s done and the habits spread.
This is why coaching can’t just be a one off. It has to be systematic – tied to what’s actually happening on calls, not to what managers assume is happening.
What Fixing Agent Coaching Actually Looks Like
The businesses that close this gap aren’t doing anything dramatic. They’re just starting with what they already have.
They look at their calls and find where conversations consistently break down. The moment a customer hears something unexpected or the point where a pricing conversation goes quiet. The call that ends without resolution. Those patterns, pulled from real conversations, become the foundation for coaching.
And when managers give feedback, it’s specific – Here’s the moment this call turned, here’s what it sounded like, here’s what could have gone differently. That’s the kind of feedback people can actually do something with.
The teams that get this right don’t just perform better in the short term. They compound. Every season and every quarter, the baseline moves up, because the coaching connects to real data.
Analyze & Evaluate Calls. At Scale.
The Bottom Line
If your team has experience but doesn’t have structured phone coaching, you’re not managing performance. You’re managing complaints.
The calls are already happening. The patterns are already there and the only question is whether you’re using them.
