4 steps to improving your coaching quality with AI

One thing every L&D team knows is that trainers and coaches aren’t cheap – especially if they’re external SMEs or professional trainers in a highly specialist topic.

The average trainer’s day rate for a straightforward one-day training workshop is anywhere from £300–£800, though costs for specialist leadership training programmes can easily run into the thousands. Whether it's one hour of virtual instructor-led training (VILT) or a multi-day face-to-face workshop, the costs add up, so it makes sense to know exactly what you're getting for your investment. 

And content is just one part of the coaching puzzle. At the very least, a trainer or coach should be an expert in their training area, whether that’s leadership, technical skills, sales techniques or something else entirely. 

But beyond the content, what separates the great coaches from the good coaches is connection. Some of this is based on personality – some trainers are simply blessed with natural charisma, meaning they can captivate an audience and make their point stick. 

On top of this, though, are soft skills like communication, active listening and change management. These soft skills can be developed and refined through insight, focus and ongoing effort – and bringing an AI skills intelligence solution like Helix into the mix makes this much more achievable than you might imagine, even if you’re responsible for hundreds or even thousands of trainers and coaches. So how does it work?

1. Establishing a soft skills baseline for coaches

L&D teams can’t measure skills improvements without a solid baseline, so getting that in place for each of your coaches and trainers should be the first priority.

Traditionally, this might be done by manually analysing qualitative learner feedback for key terms like ‘communication’ or ‘listening’, or by requiring each coach to participate in a self-assessment of their soft skills.

With platforms like Helix, you can simply invite the Helix bot to a trainer’s VILT sessions (hosted on Google Meets, Microsoft Teams or Zoom), and Helix will passively listen out for examples of soft skills while the trainer is hosting their session.

Immediately after the session, Helix will then analyse the transcript to provide the coach with a score for the key skills and behaviours demonstrated. L&D teams can pick a set time period (such as the next week or their next five training sessions) to determine each coach’s soft skills baseline, which will paint a picture of where each coach’s strengths and growth areas lie.

COMING SOON: The ability to add your own custom skills and skillsets to Helix is coming very soon! Follow us on LinkedIn to be the first to hear when this much-requested feature is ready.

2. Identifying strengths and growth opportunities for coaches

Once you have your soft skills baseline for each coach, it’s time to dig deeper into the data so coaches know where to focus their efforts.

This can be done via each coach’s skills dashboard, where they can access skills feedback and scores from specific meetings, as well as a graph displaying their weekly performance across all skills demonstrated within their VILT sessions.

3. Providing coaches with actionable feedback

Practical advice to improve these skills can be found within individual meeting feedback or in the weekly summary. For instance, if a coach notices that their active listening skills could use some work, Helix will offer personalised feedback like ‘To improve your active listening skills, consider inviting questions and summarising a speaker’s input to show understanding’.

But Helix goes further. For a more dynamic, real-time learning experience, a coach can click the ‘Coach me on this’ button found alongside their meeting-level feedback. This will send their feedback directly to VeeCoach, 5app’s AI tutor agent, which will give them personalised tips and resources pulled directly from the LMS, as well as structured AI learning activities such as roleplays and scenarios.

4. Measuring and analysing improvement over time

When you’re investing in live training, you need to know it’s working, so introducing an AI skills intelligence solution into the QA process is a great way to measure and analyse those all-important soft skills to ensure your coaches are up to scratch.

On top of coaches being able to track their own soft skills, the L&D team have access to a heatmap for an at-a-glance view of trainers’ strengths and growth areas. For instance, you can see if Coach A is particularly strong across the board, or if Coach B needs to work on their growth mindset and communication skills.

This can help L&D teams plan out which coaches are best suited to different types of training sessions, and where they should focus their ‘train-the-trainer’ efforts to ensure everyone is performing at their best. 

You can also monitor improvements over time, so you can see where your learning interventions are having the most impact. This ensures that high-quality coaching becomes a permanent part of your learning offering, and keeps the focus on long-term skills development that is perfectly personalised to every coach.

An example of using AI skills intelligence to improve coaching quality

Alex is one of 100 coaches at ABC Corp. They’re well-liked by learners, but the L&D team has noticed that the learning outcomes from their sessions aren’t as high as they could be.

Alex invites Helix to a week’s worth of Zoom VILT sessions. At the end of each session, they receive an email summarising their use of soft skills, and they notice that active listening is consistently being flagged as a growth opportunity. Helix suggests some behaviour tweaks, such as inviting questions and checking in with learners more frequently.

Over the next month, Alex applies these tips, and sees that their active listening score has improved by 20%. 

The L&D team reviews learner performance, and notices that learning outcomes for Alex’s sessions have improved in tandem with their active listening improvements.

Building a culture of continuous coaching improvement with AI

With AI, L&D teams are finally empowered to assess the impact of their coaches and trainers. Instead of just implementing a ‘train-the-trainer’ programme and hoping for the best, we can know for sure what’s working, what isn’t working and which coaches are operating in line with our quality standards.

With AI skills intelligence solutions like Helix, you can roll out a culture of continuous coaching improvement without the involvement of expensive human assessors, biased self-assessments or surface-level post-training ‘happy sheets’.

Instead, you can measure coaches’ soft skills in real time, empower them with unique insights into their own performance, and help nudge every trainer up to the required quality level, all with the power, speed and efficiency of AI.