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Summary
As business competition intensifies and customers become less loyal, companies must optimize each interaction they have with their customers. Customer-facing employees play a key role; recent benchmark research from Ventana Research found that one-to-one telephone calls are still the most popular form of interaction among customers. These employees receive support in several ways; one of the most valuable is one-to-one coaching by their supervisors. During such sessions, supervisors can pass on practical advice that they have learned from their own experience or working with their teams. PowerCoach, a new product from Merced Systems, helps companies formalize this process in their efforts to get the best productivity from both supervisors and employees.

Assessment
Ventana Research’s benchmark research on the use of technology to handle customer interactions notes that customers touch a business in multiple business units, including marketing, sales, field service and the contact center. Each of these interactions plays a part in creating the customer’s total experience, which in turn impacts how long customers stay loyal to a company and how much money they spend with it. A key factor in how well employees deal with interactions is the depth and quality of coaching they receive from their supervisors. This coaching supplements formal training; in it, supervisors can pass on their own experience and that of others under their authority in a manner personal to each employee.

Merced PowerCoach is a new product from Merced Systems designed to support companies in their efforts to formalize coaching. It enables them to monitor the whole coaching process by creating customized forms that document the sessions and allow employees to acknowledge the outcomes, by setting personal targets and monitoring performance relative to them and by tracking agreed follow-up actions. It includes a preconfigured workflow engine that supports the outcomes among everyone involved in the coaching process and can send event-based alerts to remind employees of their commitments to follow up. Users can generate reports detailing information, goals and actions that enable supervisors and employees to manage and track the success of the coaching process. PowerCoach also produces information that gives managers and executive insight into how well the process is working and the impact it has on the business.

Merced makes the product available only as on-demand software as a service (SaaS) hosted on the Internet. This licensing method reduces the user organization’s initial cost, time and risk of setting up the service and requires few internal resources. As a stand-alone product, PowerCoach requires no systems integration or external data sources. Users access it through the familiar interface of a Web browser.

Market Impact
PowerCoach is one of the few software products that focus purely on coaching. Vendors such as AIM Technology, Envision and Witness Actionable Solutions offer similar functionality but it comes embedded within their products that cover the complete agent management life cycle. Merced Systems has broad experience in working with contact centers and back-office functions such as claims management and field service, and PowerCoach is suitable for any department that has customer-facing employees, including branch offices. As a hosted solution, it is scalable for all sizes of organization, and the pricing model should not exclude any potential users. On that basis, we expect it to carve out a significant slice of what is today an inadequately served market.

Recommendation
Customer-facing employees, whether in the contact center or other departments, often are an undervalued resource in a company; they handle the majority of interactions with customers, and research shows that one bad interaction can cause a customer to stop doing business with a company. Coaching is a primary way to pass on valuable first-hand experience that can help employees give customers get the best service during interactions. Ventana Research recommends that companies seeking to formalize their approach and get more from the interaction of coaches and employees consider PowerCoach.

Related Research Notes
True Measures of Customer Satisfaction
CustomerSat’s technology helps assess and monitor customer satisfaction

Contact Centers Struggle for Customers’ Trust
U.K. Customer Contact Association forum reveals pressure to change

Improving the Self-Service Customer Experience
Tealeaf delivers insight into customers’ use of the Web