CONTACT CENTER DATA AND REPORTING

Everyone tracks the same data types and uses them to measure performance.  Agents track their data; team managers track their team data, and site managers compare data to other sites.

Contact centers tend to operate in stressful environments, where you must manage thousands of calls each hour while maintaining a high standard of customer service. To do this effectively, you must be dialed into the latest metrics and KPIs, such as current service level, call volume, and call resolution rates. Use these contact center KPIs and metrics to track your performance during the busiest days.

Metrics Are Personal

Not every manager utilizes the same data.  An online shoe retailer, for example, doesn’t track talk times.  They don’t care how long you talk with customers.  From industry to industry, metrics vary depending on what’s mission critical.  You can get lost in the mountains of metrics or you can narrow down to your top five!

What Being People-Oriented Looks Like: 

Organizations commonly adopt a people-oriented leadership style. This style focuses on improving interpersonal relationships, creating a positive work environment, and increasing productivity. Understanding the principles and benefits of this style can help readers better decide whether to adopt these ideals in an organization or team they lead.

People-oriented Leadership Styles:

● Recognition and rewards: The importance of relationships and rewards is usually understood. Recognizing and rewarding a hard-working employee informs the team that their performance is appreciated, inspiring them to perform at an even higher level. These rewards can be formal awards or increased compensation.

● Facilitating positive relationships: People-oriented leaders see positive relationships as just as necessary as task completion. These leaders believe that employees are more productive when they operate in a working environment that is generally positive on a social level. Because people-oriented leaders achieve job satisfaction and increased productivity, many prefer to work with them over task-oriented ones.

● Coaching and development: When employees are coached, they can improve their skills without fear of consequences. People-oriented leaders emphasize coaching team members to enhance their relationships with others and their productivity.

● Communication: Honest and open dialogue are critical to people-oriented leaders. This communication style shows employees that all opinions are valid and valued, making the decision-making process in these groups democratic. This freedom to share provides a wide range of views, increasing the diversity of thought. This also positively affects the organization's decision-making.

Several other ‘favorite’ metrics did not make the top 10:
• Active and Waiting Calls
• Schedule Adherence
• Calls Per Hour
• Conversion Rates
• Employee Engagement
• Promise to Pay (typically used in debt collection)
• Abandon Rates
• Speed of Answer
• Customer Effort Score
• Non-value-add Calls (where customer could have self-served)

Many contact center managers at every level complain they lack real-time data. They want to be on the pulse of the situation to make actionable decisions, and using yesterday’s report isn’t good enough. Your contact center operations' efficient and effective management relies on access to real-time streaming data.

In the heat of the moment, managers are most interested in how many calls are in the queue, how many are holding, and for how long are they holding? The following real-time question is, do you have enough agents to handle the calls in the queues? Can you see the agent’s status and determine a game plan? Quality and C-Sat scores are essential to review and know each day, and provide data for more long-term strategies. Real-time data makes minute-by-minute split decisions on the contact center floor. Handling the call volume is the name of the game.

Choose a contact center platform that provides real-time data with informative and intuitive real-time statistics. Today’s comprehensive contact center platforms provide fully integrated remote call monitoring and visual alerting, ensuring you achieve the highest possible level of contact center quality assurance and customer service. The cloud real-time analytics engine enables unsurpassed remote monitoring for real-time data capture. You want live agent and manager dashboards providing statistics. Agents want to know how they are doing, and managers want to know what they can do to make operations run more smoothly. Data is King. Get it live!

Just imagine that every day before you get to the contact center, a file is emailed to you automatically with all the statistics you like in a format you prefer! Thinks it’s a dream? It’s for real! Today’s SaaS contact center platforms can email or FTP reports to you in a format you like, including the data you care about, when you want it. It’s simple if you have the right platform. Managers no longer should be running blind without the analytics they need to contact centers. The contact centers of the 21st century are rich in data, capability, and delivery. Set yourself up today with automatic reports. You will wonder how you lived without it.

Step one in forecasting is gathering the data. You want stacks of historical data, as history is the best indicator of the future. The first place to check is your contact center platform. A robust platform will store historical reports for up to a year. If your platform automatically emails or FTPs reports, many managers save those reports. Seek out those managers.

You want a contact center platform that saves data. What good is data if you can’t access it later? Too many contact center managers are frustrated because they can only access data back 30 days!

Look for a contact center platform that can record every activity, store it, report it, and allow you to export it for short-term or long-term storage. You want to be able to slice and dice the data per your company’s needs. The data the contact center has collected is robust and when used in strategic planning can provide insights and stories that no other organizational data can tell. Don’t let contact center providers tell you you don’t need it because they can’t get it. In today’s world, that is unacceptable. Data is power!