Contact center reporting
What is contact center reporting?
Contact center reporting—sometimes still known as call center reporting—is everything you do to track and analyze data from calls, live chats, and other communication channels. The aim is to fully understand how your center operates, the service it offers customers or efficiency of sales activities, and where you may be able to improve.
That may sound simple enough, but there’s a lot that happens within your contact center. Each individual agent action and tool function—interactive voice response (IVR), automatic call distributor (ACD), workforce management (WFM), and customer relationship management (CRM), for example—generates limitless streams of raw data.
Contact or call center reporting must translate your raw data into information that you and your employees can comprehend. If you want to get a clear picture of your conversion rates, for instance, you can use call center reporting to 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.
Some of the most used contact center reports include those related to agent activity, service level agreements (SLAs), call details, queue activity, and inbound call summary reports.
Contact or call center analytics vs. reporting: What’s the difference?
At this point, you might be thinking that call or contact center reporting and analytics sound like the same thing. That’s understandable as they are both intimately related. Let’s drill down a bit more, though, to get to the bottom of the subtle differences:
Key RingCX call center reporting software features
RingCentral RingCX is more than just contact center reporting software. It’s a truly holistic contact center solution that gives you everything you need to effectively run your center, whether it’s inbound or outbound. You do need robust reporting tools to do that, however, and RingCX has you covered thanks to:
Dashboards
Pre-built reports
Custom reports and metric builder
Real-time and historical reporting
Rich omnichannel reporting
Predictive analytics
Common contact center KPIs
Call center dashboard examples
So, that’s some of the key KPIs that you may track to assess your call or contact center’s performance. In your reporting, though, you don’t have to look at each one in isolation. Instead, by creating a contact center dashboard, you can track and assess a collection of KPIs and metrics that in combination shed light on a particular aspect of your operations. Here are a few examples of the types of call center dashboards you may wish to create and use:
General call center metrics dashboard
Sometimes, especially when you’re just getting started with contact center reporting, it pays to keep things simple. That’s where a general call center metrics dashboard—one designed to give a general overview of operations—comes in.
This type of top-level call center monitoring dashboard will help you spot big problems or, more generally, assess the efficiency of your setup. Some of the KPIs or call center reporting metrics to draw together in this dashboard include:
- Schedule adherence - Are agents sticking to agreed schedules? Are they taking too many breaks or being called into too many meetings?
- Agent occupancy - How long are agents spending on calls? Are they at risk of burnout or spending too long idle?
- Call abandonment rate - What percentage of callers are giving up before speaking to an agent?
- Average handle times - How long are agents spending with each caller? Is it as long, longer, or shorter a time than you would expect?
Call center agent performance dashboard
A call center agent dashboard is one you’ll use specifically to assess the performance of each individual agent. It’s a great way to quickly spot those individuals who should be singled out for praise and those who may need a little more support and coaching.
When putting together this kind of dashboard, you’ll focus on metrics related to the agent in question, rather than averages across the contact center. Such metrics to draw upon for these dashboards include:
- Average handle time - How long does an agent spend on average on each call or customer interaction?
- First call or contact resolution rate - What proportion of calls or customer interactions does the agent resolve on first contact?
- Average after-contact work (ACW) time - How long does it take an agent to update call notes or CRM systems and perform other post-call tasks?
Call center service level dashboard
This is one of those contact center dashboards which will differ greatly from one center to the next. In essence, it’s designed to provide an easy view of the overall service level your center provides to customers.
The reason these dashboards vary is because different contact centers use different metrics and measures to set their expected service levels. Examples of those metrics include:
- Service level - “Service level” itself is sometimes considered to be a KPI or metric. In general, it’s defined as the proportion of calls answered within a specified timeframe. For example, your call center may aim to answer calls within five minutes.
- Average speed of answer (ASA) - Rather than a certain percentage of calls answered within a set time, some centers will instead aim for an ASA across all calls that sits below a set time.
- Average call abandonment rate - Some call centers may also incorporate call abandonment rate into their service level dashboard. In this case, the aim is to keep this rate below what’s deemed an acceptable level.
Call or contact volume and demand dashboard
Contact center reporting isn’t only about assessing past and present performance. It also plays a key role in forecasting demand and helping your call center prepare for the future.
A call or contact volume and demand dashboard is one focused on metrics to aid such forecasting. They may include examples like:
- Call or interaction volume - Precisely how many calls and queries on other channels is your contact center getting?
- Peak call or contact times - Which times of the day, days, or times of the year typically produce most calls or interactions?
- Call forecast accuracy - How accurate have prior efforts at predicting demand been?
Benefits of effective contact center reporting
Contact center reports aren’t box-ticking exercises or ways to massage your ego if things are going well. Effective call center reporting involves creating meaningful reports, extracting actionable insights, and acting upon those to make improvements. Done right, it can deliver a range of tangible benefits:
Improve customer experiences
Customer experience affects retention, sales, revenue, reputation, and more. If you want to keep customers happy and encourage them to continue supporting your business, you must understand why your audience acts as they do.
Your contact center performance reports can help you track:
- Customer success
- Customer effort
- Customer demands, such as for omnichannel customer support
- Customer sentiment
The more you know about your customers, the more targeted your initiatives 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 that stays with, or even ahead of, changes in customer service.
Elevate agent performance
Quality management often starts with your call center 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
- Self-service analytics
These tools help you understand what’s happening in each 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 customer service.
Optimize 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.
Better manage remote workforces
Virtual contact centers have grown in number and popularity over the past few years, and businesses using a work-from-home setup have seen increased agent productivity and flexibility. 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 staff.
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. Though you can’t walk the floor to see how everyone is doing, you can use your reporting and analytics tools to keep an eye on your team. You can quickly provide effective coaching to those who need it and praise agents who are performing well. Your team may not be within sight, but you can easily keep them within reach.
Contact center reporting challenges to overcome
The benefits of contact center reporting done well, then, are clear. If you are going to be efficient in your reporting, however, you need to be aware of the potential challenges you may face.
Quality and accessibility of data
Perhaps the biggest challenge to achieving effective contact center reporting, is the quality and accessibility of the data on which your reports are based. Poor quality or inaccurate data will inevitably lead to poor quality and inaccurate reports. What’s more, if your support channels are siloed—meaning data from each is kept separate—then, your reports will be incomplete at best and ineffectual at worst.
Informational overload
While having accessible data is indeed vital, there is still such a thing as too much information. Call center reporting shouldn’t be about collecting and displaying as many different numbers as possible. Instead, it needs to be about tracking and analyzing meaningful data which can surface actionable insights. Often, that will mean restricting rather than broadening the scope of data collection.
Organizational resistance or lack of accountability
While the best contact center reporting solutions can automatically handle lots of the process for you, that doesn’t mean organizational buy-in isn’t important. Software can generate all the reports under the sun, but the only way it matters is if your teams are committed to taking notice of and acting upon those reports. If no one is accountable for analyzing reports and implementing changes based upon them, little will happen.
Security and privacy
At least some of the data used in contact center reporting will be of a sensitive nature or be private to your customers. Security and maintaining that privacy, therefore, is another critical consideration that can become a reporting challenge if not taken seriously from the outset.
Contact center reporting best practices
Clearly define goals and objectives
The challenge of informational overload—having loads of data but being too overwhelmed to do anything worthwhile with it—is easily solved by clearly defining your contact center reporting goals.
Before you even start building your first call center report, make sure you’re certain of what you want to achieve. Here are some useful questions to ask yourself:
- Will your reporting be focused on customer satisfaction, agent productivity, or something else?
- Are there specific issues or areas you already know need addressing?
- What data is available to you?
- What’s your reporting timeframe? When do you want to see results?
Asking—and answering these questions—will help you generate SMART goals. Ones which are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Start with a tight focus on KPIs
As their name suggests, KPIs are the measures of performance that are most key to your contact center operations. When starting out with contact center reporting, it will pay to stay focused on these, at least for a while.
These KPIs should be closely related to your overall business goals. As such, a clear understanding of them and any insights into how to improve them will be most meaningful and useful. Once you feel you’re on top of your KPIs, you can always expand the scope of your reporting.
Set performance benchmarks
As well as knowing which are your KPIs, it’s also important to understand what the numbers you’re achieving actually mean. In isolation, knowing that your contact center’s average speed of answer (ASA) is six minutes and 30 seconds isn’t all that useful. What’s useful is knowing how that compares to other contact centers in your industry or to what your ASA was three months ago.
This is what benchmarking is all about. By performing analysis into your own past performance and wider industry standards, you can put the results unearthed in your contact center reports into meaningful context.
Act on reports and insights
Done well, call center reporting should generate useful and actionable insights into your operations. Actionable means that the information suggests steps to take to make improvements. So, make sure you take them.
At the very least, your call center reports should be shared with relevant stakeholders and decision-makers. Then, the next steps for improving operations will also be clear to those in a position to make them happen.
Continually assess and improve your contact center reporting
Contact center reporting shouldn’t be a “set and forget” process. Creating useful reports and dashboards is great, but you should also continually assess the insights they generate and tweak or change them as required.
Take note of both customer and agent feedback, and try to spot areas you’re not reporting on enough or new insights it may be good to capture. Pay attention if your agents tell you that current reports don’t present a true narrative. They’re on the frontlines, and are likely to know. Just make sure you also ask for suggestions on how to improve them.
Use the right tools to help
Fortunately, contact center reporting today is easier to achieve than ever before. That’s thanks to tools and solutions like RingCentral RingCX which leverage cutting-edge technology, like AI, to help you on your way.
With RingCX you get comprehensive contact center analytics which helps you easily unearth business-critical insights. Leveraging historical and live data, as well as conversation intelligence, you can build meaningful contact center reports and ID the changes which will give your performance a leg-up.
Put critical business insights at your fingertips with contact center reporting from RingCX
