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Real-time call center reporting and analytics
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Call center metrics have always been important. Reporting and analytics show agent performance, help you evaluate key performance indices, and give contact center managers the data needed to offer informed decisions. As many contact centers have moved to a remote, work-from-home operation, reporting practices have only grown in importance.
Real-time and historical reporting give you the data you need to know what’s happening within your contact center and workforce. They also help you improve your customer experiences and service. By pinpointing and resolving issues on a granular level, you can stay ahead of your competitors and create a brand your consumers love.
Using this information, you can build and sustain an operation that achieves excellent customer engagement. As you provide high-quality, tangible results to your customers, you can keep them satisfied and happy with your work.
What is contact center reporting?
Contact center reporting is a tool that takes all of your contact center’s data and translates it into information that you and your employees can comprehend.
You have a lot happening in your contact center. Every action your agents take creates data that reflects the specifics of that activity and how it affects your operation on a higher level. While this raw data is nice, it’s also endless. After all, multiple agents are working every second of the day, creating new information to understand.
If you want to get a clear picture of your conversion rates, for example, you can use your contact center analytics to create a report that pulls in all of the relevant information. You can compare historical data with real-time analytics to see if your call center performance is up to par. These actionable insights then allow you to find and fix any issues in your sales funnel to see greater sales numbers.
Common Contact Center KPIs
The insights you gain from reporting tools help you create realistic goals for your operations and team. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the performance measurements that contact center managers use to determine how effectively they are meeting these goals. By monitoring these KPIs, you can make real-time adjustments to your strategies to improve your results. Common KPIs include:
- Average queue times
- Average handle times
- Average abandonment rate
- First call resolution
- Occupancy rates
- Percentage of calls blocked
Along with metrics associated with contact center performance, you can track and create strategic goals for your workforce management, including improvements on the following:
- Agent turnover
- Adherence to schedule
- Agent absenteeism
- Agent uptime
Every business has different key metrics to track and use to improve customer experiences for their own unique audience. To get the benefits they need out of their contact center data, they first need a tool that brings all of these insights together.
What is a contact center dashboard?
Contact center dashboards give managers, supervisors, and agents a quick yet detailed look at the state of their contact centers. This analytics resource center allows you to customize the contact center reports and key findings you want to see.
You can view performance metrics, such as average agent resolution rates. You can also track multi-channel reporting on your dashboard, comparing social media results and phone system interactions in a moment. These data visualizations are designed to simplify analytics and offer the data you need to make quick decisions.
Your performance dashboard is one of the most important tools a modern contact center with cloud communications can use to understand data. In a unified contact center, you can quickly understand what’s happening in every area of your organization. Some of the at-a-glance metrics you can view in call center dashboards include:
- Queue information
- Interaction data
- Real-time operations
- Agent performance
- Team results
This easy access to performance data enables you to make quick, sound decisions about your contact center and team. The information you’re looking for is always at your fingertips, ready whenever you need it.
What is the difference between reporting and analytics?
Analytics and reports typically go hand-in-hand. When you’re using a good contact center solution, you won’t get one without the other.
That said, it’s also important to understand that these terms do not mean the same thing. In the table below, we’ve broken down some of the key differences.
| Reporting | Analytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | The process of transforming raw data into simplified summaries, such as KPI reports, so you can understand how your contact center operation is performing. | The process of examining your reports and data to find actionable insights that you can use to make changes and improvements. |
| Real-life applications | Reporting solutions give you the data you need to start asking questions. They provide the “what” so you can start asking why. | Call center analytics supply the information you need to find solutions. It shows you why you’re having the problems or getting the results you see so you can make educated improvements. |
| For example | Reporting tells you that your latest email campaign is showing lower numbers of customer engagement than previous efforts. | Analytics shows that consumers responded poorly to your subject line, so many didn’t even bother opening it. |
Benefits of contact center reporting
Now that you know what contact center reporting and analytics are, it’s time to talk about how they can help improve customer care and workforce optimization.
As a contact center manager, the knowledge base you can build with data is invaluable. These tools are critical to continually improving your operation and showing leadership that you are adding value to the brand.
They also give your operation the flexibility it needs to keep up with the quick changes and growing demands of customers to ensure customer satisfaction. The more you understand about your contact center and customers, the more you can achieve.
1. Improve customer experiences
The customer experience is at the core of business success in the 21st century. It affects customer retention, sales, revenue, reputation, and more. If you want to keep customers happy and encourage them to continue supporting your business, you have to understand why your audience acts the way they do. Your real-time reports can help you track:
- Customer success
- Customer effort
- Customer demands, such as omnichannel customer service
- Customer sentiment
The more you know about your customers, the more targeted your efforts can be. You can refine the customer journey by anticipating consumer actions and proactively engaging them. Reporting gives you the insights you need to turn nearly every customer interaction and chat with sales agents into success stories with your advanced reporting tools. You can build the ultimate experience, one that stays with, or even ahead of, changes in customer service.
2. Elevate agent performance
Your agents play the most important role in customer support. They are the ones directly connecting to customers, so you need total confidence in their performance.
Quality management often starts with your reporting and analytics. You can use your contact center reporting tools to evaluate your agents’ interactions with customers, adherence to company guidelines, and overall success. Some of the tools available include:
- Speech analytics
- Text analytics
- Interaction analytics
- Self-service analytics
- Omnichannel analytics
These tools help you understand what’s happening in each individual interaction. If you notice frequent instances of unfriendly behavior, poor writing skills, or speech problems, they can help you quickly find solutions that will restore your excellent service.
Performance evaluations
Performance reports, also known as performance management tools, allow you to combine data from your platform and other integrated resources, such as a CRM system or a sales database, to provide business insights. With these insights, you can see information such as how many calls an agent made and how much they actually sold.
You can also use quality management tools to listen to call recordings or view screen recordings of customer interactions. These tools are great for performance reviews and agent feedback opportunities. And, if you end up with an employee situation that involves human resources, you can have the data you need to back your decisions.
By using daily, weekly, or monthly reports to evaluate your KPIs, you can ensure your agents are reliably meeting your goals. If you notice an operation-wide problem, you can use reports to see if agents need access to more training and tools, such as a resource library, or if the problem is with your system.
3. Optimize costs
Keeping contact centers operational is a big job. Often, you don’t have the time to look through every area of your center to find the small ways to save on costs.
Unified reporting provides the insights you need to streamline your work from top to bottom. If there are too many steps in your call flow, for example, you can save time and effort by simplifying the process. These small inefficiencies often create big costs over time, so you can achieve big savings both now and moving forward.
Best of all, your analytics provide the evidence you need to back your requests to stakeholders. Instead of struggling to get your bosses to see your view, you can provide solid proof that supports your position. Though it doesn’t guarantee the solutions you need, it can help as you make your case.
4. Manage remotely with contact center reports
Virtual contact centers have grown in number and popularity over the past few years. Businesses using a work-from-home setup have seen increases in productivity and flexibility as agents connect from all over the world. Since employees are no longer in the same physical space as managers and supervisors, contact centers have had to use different options to manage their workforces.
Reporting is one of the best industry solutions for virtual oversight. Using the data available for each agent, no matter where they’re located, you can measure the efficiency and effectiveness of their work.
You can easily see if agents are struggling to meet quotas or if they aren’t following data security standards, putting your company at risk. You can even evaluate customer feedback, checking to see if there are complaints of distractions or loud noises in the background.
Though you can’t walk the floor to see how everyone is doing, you can use your analytics tools to keep an eye on your team. You can quickly provide support to those who need it and praise to agents who are performing well. Your team may not be within sight, but you can easily keep them within reach.
Contact center reporting best practices
To enjoy the benefits offered by contact center reporting, you first have to know how to use your tools. Here, we’ve laid out several best reporting practices that can help you understand and improve your contact center operations.
How to measure contact center performance
1. Find the best call center reporting tools
Getting the right insights starts with the tools you have at your disposal. Your call center software solution should give you a wide range of options for reporting and analysis. Both reports and dashboards should be customizable, allowing you to find the exact information you need in any circumstance.
They should also be easy to use. Neither you nor your staff should have to spend hours looking for or creating the reports you need. Instead, look for an option that makes reporting simple. Look for at-a-glance insights, intuitive report builders, and the ability to look at both big-picture and granular data.
2. Consolidate your data
This is especially important if you run an omnichannel contact center or multiple centers. When you’re running reports, be sure to include information from all of your channels and locations.
These tools are made to help you manage more efficiently, so use them to analyze every area of your operation. The more you know about your contact centers, the more effective your decisions can be.
3. Set informed goals with contact center analytics
Improvements only begin with your reporting and analysis tools. Once you have the information you need, it’s then your job to put these insights into action. Get your team together to go over the information you’ve gathered so everyone is on the same page.
Brainstorm solutions to the problems you see and ways to make good results even better. Agents often bear the brunt of unrealistic expectations, so use your data to create attainable goals that prevent burnout.
When setting your goals, ask your team questions such as:
- How can we improve our customer experience?
- Do agents have the tools they need to succeed in their work?
- How can we reduce our costs?
- Are we happy with our level of workplace satisfaction?
Using your reporting tools and dashboards, you can then track progress in real time. You can quickly find and address any flaws in your plans. With every adjustment, your team can achieve more with fewer problems.
Key features of contact center reporting tools
Your contact center solution is always going to be your greatest resource for achieving the productivity and results you want to see. With all the different types of platforms available, it’s no surprise that every contact center reporting solution offers its own unique features.
RingCentral, for example, provides capabilities such as the ability to:
- Create customized views of your data for every member of your team with widget-based, real-time dashboards
- Offer managers and supervisors an overall look at their teams’ performance and your brand’s customer experience
- Give agents access to their workload at a glance at all times
- Use pre-built reports to understand your contact center performance based on metrics
- Build and share report templates customized to your specific needs with our wizard-based “point-and-click” interface
- Give secure data access to your company’s analysts, allowing them to use point-and-click tools to quickly build powerful pivot tables and integrated, custom reports
- Integrate performance metrics to gain actionable insights into your customer interactions and how they affect your business
These features and more give you the business intelligence you need to make smart decisions about your contact center and workforce, every second of the day. If you’re looking for a contact center platform with the reporting capabilities you need to be successful, be sure to look for the features listed below.
| What it is | Why it matters | |
|---|---|---|
| Dashboards | The main hub of contact center data, this tool is where you can view and use your data. | No one has time to sift through every bit of data. Dashboards give you a quick, real-time look at how your center is performing. It also allows you to customize the information and reports you see, offering quick updates and support for urgent decisions. |
| Pre-built reports | These reports offer insights on commonly-used contact center metrics, such as average handle time and first call resolution. | Save time by getting the basic information you need to keep your contact center running with a few clicks. |
| Custom reports | Use templates to easily build customized reports with the unique information you need. | When you need more in-depth information, you can use intuitive report builders to access customized analyses. |
| Real-time and historical reporting | Data that tells you how your operation is doing now and how it performed previously. | Some solutions only offer one type of data, but you need both. Real-time reporting helps you make critical decisions quickly. Historical data helps you understand what has changed in your contact center and why. |
| Omnichannel reporting | Reports that include data from all of your efforts, across all of your channels. | Understand how your channels are performing and the costs of every engagement with access to all of your data. |
| Integrations | Track data from all of your contact center tools in a single location. | Get the full picture of your operation with information about all of your tools, actions, and results. |
| Predictive analytics | Use your historical data to predict future trends. | Proactively prepare for changes in volume, customer demands, and other areas of your operations with reports that look at what’s coming next. |
Take charge of your contact center with powerful insights into your contact center, team, and performance. RingCentral customer experience solutions offer a wide range of analytics and reporting tools that provide the in-depth information you need to make business-critical decisions when they matter most.