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Five Tips for Call & Contact Center Reporting

Spectrum’s Five Tips for successful Unified Contact Center Reporting:

1. Determine Goals:

State your goals for reporting solution; and do it in writing. Too often, goal expectations vary from person to person. This uncertainty implies the goal isn’t a goal at all, more likely a plan of action or steps to create a better call center. The goal must be written down properly for all involved to understand. The goal should be measurable and stated in clearly defined terms that leave nothing to interpretation.

Some examples of goals for the call center:

  • Improve agent productivity
  • Increase revenue
  • Improve the customers experience with the call center
  • Reduce operating expenses
  • Reduce agent attrition

2. Analytics:

Call centers have a wealth of data hidden away in application databases. Capturing the data that exists in these applications can provide the call center with vital information that can be used to improve the overall performance of the call center and its agents.

The data could come from many data sources, multi-channel ACDs, SQL, JSON, Help Desk software, CSat surveys, and other in-house data sources. If the most important metrics from these data sources could be displayed on a large wallboard, or directly to an agent Desktop; these Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) would provide the essential knowledge needed to improve proficiency.

Next decide which KPIs within these data sources will be most helpful in obtaining your goals. If one of your goals, for example, is to improve agent productivity the types of data that you should be displaying include:

  • Agent Occupancy (How much time the agent spends actually working)
  • Adherence
  • Agent Idle Time

3. Analytics by Audience(s):

Each level within the call center need access to specific types of information to ease daily struggles. Agents and managers need a variety of real-time and historical so they know how the center is performing. Real-time data provides the right now metrics, and reviewing historical data will help center prepare for trends.

It’s crucial that everyone in the call center has access to real-time information; but what types of data do agents, team leaders, or managers actually need to see? Agents who directly affect organizational goals should see their personal status to build personal performance. Real-time and historical trends will help team leaders and manager react proactively, seeing an overall scope of the call center performance.

What type data should be displayed for each Audience? Below are some initial variables to discuss.

  • Are the agents and managers at their desks, walking the floor, or both?
  • Responsibilities vary by departments, by shift, and agent seniority.
    • Rookie or veteran agents require different data
  • Managers usually have more responsibilities.
    • Multiple groups
    • Multiple Challenges

4. Targeting the Audience:

Think about the goals for the call center and determine which team members within the call center will benefit most, and what type of analytics will drive individual performance. As we’ve stated; Agents, Team Leaders (supervisors), Call Center Managers and Senior Management all have different tasks that require a unique set of KPIs to accomplish those tasks.

Being able to target the audiences with a variety of display options is almost as important as the data itself. Critical content can be funneled to Groups on various large LCD/LED screens, agents and managers can be targeted on desktops and dashboards, and web reports can be configured for large displays, manager desktop reports, and even mobile devices. The idea is to easily target specific agents and managers with real-time thresholds where you need them.

5. Results:

Prior to putting a Unified Contact Center Reporting solution in place, measure and record the KPI statistics as a Baseline. Next determine where the call center should be within 6 months after the reporting solution is implemented. After 6 months review your results and make changes accordingly. The goals of the real time reporting solution is to measure track and adjust.

Sharing the results with the call center is recommend but not only the negative. Agents and managers should also discuss the positive results, they need to know what’s working and what isn’t working. There are few Contact Center Managers that believe that agents should only see the negative as motivation tool but after decades of research, this idea is both short term and irresponsible.

Thinking and acting on these five tips for deploying a Unified Contact Center Reporting solution will result in a successful installation that improves the overall call center.

To learn more about Spectrum’s Unified Contact Center Solutions check out more of our website or reach out to Spectrum directly.