How Real-Time Coaching Transformed Onboarding, Compliance, and Call Quality at Scale

The Challenge: Scaling Training Without Sacrificing Quality

As Horizon Services continued to grow, its contact center faced a familiar but increasingly urgent problem: training and quality assurance weren’t scaling with the business.

“Before Balto, our supervisors had to listen to each call manually. That’s just not scalable.”
— James Luxton, VP of Customer Service

Onboarding new agents often took weeks—an industry-wide challenge in home improvement, where agents must quickly learn HVAC system types, plumbing and electrical services, warranty options, financing plans, and seasonal promotions, all while mastering the high sales and customer service standards that brands like Horizon expect.

Supervisors were stretched thin, forced to manually review a small sample of calls and react after issues had already occurred. Coaching depended heavily on availability and individual judgment, leading to inconsistencies across teams.

Equally as difficult, Horizon’s leadership lacked a reliable way to verify what was actually being said on customer calls. Critical moments, like required service disclaimers, pricing and financing disclosures, warranty explanations, emergency call handling, and the tone agents used when scheduling technicians or discussing repairs, were difficult to track and even harder to enforce consistently.

The result:

• Slower ramp times for new hires
• Reactive, inconsistent QA
• Limited visibility into real customer conversations
• Increased risk around compliance and messaging

Horizon needed a way to support agents in the moment, not weeks later—and to do it without sacrificing authenticity or customer rapport.

The Solution: Real-Time, Flexible Coaching—Built for Humans

Balto became Horizon’s real-time coaching layer, working alongside agents during live calls to guide conversations, reinforce best practices, and ensure critical language was delivered correctly.

But this wasn’t about forcing agents into rigid scripts.

James and his team wanted structure without sounding scripted—a system that protected what mattered most while still allowing agents to sound like themselves.

“We lock the lines that are non-negotiable—like disclaimers and privacy. But for the rest, agents can use their own voice. That’s important to us. That’s how we build rapport.”
— James Luxton

Just as important, Balto integrated seamlessly into Horizon’s contact center stack. Using Balto’s audio streaming API, it connected directly with Horizon’s 8×8 CCaaS, delivering real-time guidance on live calls without disrupting agent workflows or requiring heavy technical lift—so teams saw value immediately, without changing how they worked.

With Balto:

• Critical compliance disclosures and language were locked in and prompted in real time
• Flexible talking points allowed agents to personalize conversations naturally
• New hires received live guidance on their very first calls
• Supervisors gained full visibility into every conversation through searchable transcripts and AI-curated coaching clips

Instead of hunting for examples, managers could instantly access the calls that mattered most—both wins and opportunities for improvement.

The Results: Faster Ramp, Stronger Consistency, Smarter Coaching

“We’re more consistent across the board—and faster than ever.”

Balto helped Horizon shift from reactive QA to proactive, real-time performance improvement.

Key Outcomes:

• Accelerated onboarding
  New hires ramped faster, with real-time guidance supporting them from their very first live calls.
• Complete call visibility
  Every customer conversation was automatically captured, transcribed, and evaluated—eliminating blind spots and reliance on random sampling.
• More effective, targeted coaching
  Managers coached with confidence using real calls and AI-curated moments, rather than assumptions or incomplete data.
• Stronger, more reliable compliance
  Locked script sections ensured critical language was consistently delivered, reducing risk without sacrificing flexibility.
• Greater consistency at scale
  Best practices were reinforced across teams and locations, regardless of supervisor capacity or agent experience.

The Impact: From Rearview Coaching to Real-Time Control

Balto didn’t just improve Horizon’s call center operations—it changed how performance was managed altogether.

Supervisors stopped digging through old recordings and started coaching with clarity and confidence. Agents hit the ground running with built-in support. And leadership gained instant, reliable insight into what was actually happening on every customer conversation.

This wasn’t just an operational upgrade.
It was a fundamental shift:

• From reactive to real-time
• From inconsistent to standardized
• From guesswork to certainty

With Balto, Horizon Services built a scalable foundation for growth—without compromising quality, compliance, or the human connection that matters most.