CONTACT CENTER DATA AND REPORTING

Everyone is tracking the same types of data and using it to measure performance.  Agents’ track their personal 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 need to manage thousands of calls each hour while maintaining a high standard of customer services. To do this effectively, you need to 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 through the busiest and most hectic 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!

Be People-Oriented

What Being People-Oriented Looks Like: It is a common thing nowadays for organizations to adopt a people-oriented style of leadership. This style of leadership focuses on interpersonal relationships with the intention of improving said relationships in a bid to create a positive work environment and increase productivity. Understanding the principles and benefits of a people-oriented style of leadership can inform the reader to better decide if they would like to adopt these ideals in an organization or team they lead.

People-oriented Leadership Styles:

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

● Facilitating positive relationships: Positive relationships are seen as just as important as the completion of tasks by people-oriented leaders. 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 manage to achieve job satisfaction and increased productivity, many individuals prefer to work with leaders who are people-oriented over task-oriented ones.

● Coaching and development: Employees can improve their skills without fear of consequences when they are coached. People-oriented leaders place an emphasis on coaching team members to improve their relationships with others as well as their productivity.

● Communication: Honest and open dialogue is of great importance to people-oriented leaders. This style of communication 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 opinions that increases the diversity of thought. This also positively affects the decision-making of the organization.

There were a number of other ‘favorite’ metrics that 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 don’t have real time data. They want to get their finger on the pulse to make actionable decisions and using yesterday’s report just isn’t good enough. The efficient and effective management of your contact center operations rely 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 next 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 important to review and know each day and provide data for more long-term strategies. Real time data is for making 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 ensures 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 in real time how they a re doing and managers want to know in real time what can they 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 personally like in a format you prefer! Thinks it’s a dream? It’s for real! Today’s SaaS contact center platforms have the capability to 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 run contact centers. The contact centers of the 21st century are rich in data, rich in capability and rich in 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. History is the best indicator of the future. The first place to check is your contact center platform. A robust platform will have historical reports stored for up to a year. If your platform emails or FTPs reports automatically many managers save those reports. Seek out those managers.

You want a contact center platform that saves the data! What good is data if you can’t go back to it? Too many contact center managers are frustrated because they can only go 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 powerful 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 that you don’t need it because they can’t get it. In today’s world, that is unacceptable. Data is power!