About us

The Qcoach.com Story

Qcoach.com originated from a unique set of circumstances which together created the uniqueness of our offering. Costas Johnson, the founder, set up Qualtrak as a specialist performance management consultancy servicing the call center industry in the UK.  Whilst working with a major mobile company helping it to achieve consistency in the customer experience across six call centers and more than 5,000 advisors, Costas witnessed an event which resulted in Qcoach.com a few years later.  The client trained around 30 of its advisors in call evaluation skills (same 4 day course as for team leaders.)  They were then monitored over a period of weeks to see if it had any effect on their customer handling skills.  It had a significant effect!  Costas realised that the cause of the performance improvement was their newly acquired ability to fully recognise and understand what ‘excellence’ looked like and therefore being able to self-assess their customer interactions objectively and accurately.  Every call became an opportunity to learn because they could recognise where the gaps were.  However with a large number of customer representatives the permanent solution could not be through classroom training.

Shortly after this experience Costas was relaying this to his son who had just completed his teacher training, who replied “We studied this learning principle at University, it is called ‘Assessment for Learning’ and is fully validated.  When you teach the student to know the difference between a good essay and an average essay it has a positive effect on their essay writing abilities.  Why?  Because as they are writing their essay they are consciously aware of the quality of their essay because they know what is required.  They are learning via the process of self-assessment.”  His son went on to explain that the authors of the original ‘Assessment for Learning’ report argued that the best way to instil these skills was by constantly asking the students good probing/searching questions which cause the learner to go on a journey of self-discovery.  This is a description of good coaching!

WOW! What if we could use technology (online learning) to train customer representatives to unconsciously self-assess their own calls and be capable of knowing whether their call meets 'excellence' by providing them with regular bite-sized learning during down-times. It was necessary that the learning methodology replicated a coaching style learning approach based on the use of probing questions linked to a recorded customer call or a video of a face-to-face interaction.  But why stop at call centers?  Why not use a video recording of a face-to-face interaction thus extending the application to numerous job roles which are dependant on the use of good ‘soft skills’ e.g. selling, negotiating, interviewing, counselling, customer service, coaching, teaching and many more.

The vision of Qcoach.com was born.  But what was going to trigger the vision?  The answer came along in the form of Enron!  Enron UK had become a major client and when Enron Corp collapsed spectacularly in 2002 it caused Qualtrak to give birth to the Qcoach.com Project.

Qcoach.com is Software as a Service (SaaS) and provides free access to any Subject Matter Expert (SME) to open an account, author courses using Rapid Development E-learning principles i.e. no need to be an expert in instructional design, graphic design, involve a host of people, or take 12 to 16 weeks to produce content at a cost of between US$30k and US$ 60k per hour of content when it only takes one SME 10hours.  We will provide the resources to market their courses worldwide.

The Qcoach.com business model consists of two parallel entrepreneurial arms - commercial and social, whose individual success is derived from their interdependence.  The social dimension focuses on working in partnership with government, non-governmental organisations, charities and social entrepreneurs to use Qcoach.com as a vehicle to bring high quality school/college education and health awareness content to the poor and disadvantaged.  We are building into the system the ability to give content authors the opportunity, via a charitable foundation, to make their content available for use in developing countries at an affordable price or at zero cost.

To be continued....

Management Team

Costas Johnson

Founder & CEO

Costas Johnson founded Qualtrak Solutions 12 years ago having previously been the Human Resources Director for a number of major service organizations including Avis Rent A Car, Otis Elevator and Thorn EMI's Security & Fire Alarms subsidiary.  In 2008 he set up Qcoach.com Ltd, a privately owned company, to develop and exploit this web-based hosted on-demand learning platform.  Costas's main responsibility is to continue building a strong and highly talented team of people located in different parts of the world who will collectively make this a great company to work for.  His mission is to also create a parallel ‘social entrepreneurial’ organization, constituted as a charitable foundation.

Georgina Foster

Product Support Manager

Georgina has been with Qualtrak for over 7 years and is responsible for supporting our clients and partners. She also has the responsibility for testing the Qcoach.com developments and approving them for release.

Wendy Aldiss

Consultancy Services Director

Wendy is the ‘Editor in Chief’ of the courses created for the call center industry – namely, customer representative ‘soft skills’ training and the soon to be published courses in coaching and call evaluation skills for team leaders. Wendy is also responsible for training authors and helping clients to implement large scale projects based on Qcoach.com.

Garrard Kitchen

Head of Qcoach.com (software) Development

Garrard is responsible for leading the evolution of Qcoach.com.

Mike Royle

Head of Call Evaluation and Coaching Product (software) Development

Mike started with Qualtrak 8 years ago and is responsible for developing the highly successful Call Evaluation & Coaching Software product called 'Evaluate', which is being used by many OEM voice recording companies to produce a Quality Monitoring solution for call centers.

Jim Johnson

Operations & Finance Director

Jim has recently joined Qcoach.com to support the company as it grows to become a significant organization operating globally.