Using Reporting and Analytics to Improve Performance

Andrea Jara at Talkdesk explains how to use call centre reporting and analytics to improve performance.

Call centers produce large amounts of data every day.

Each phone call, each minute an agent spends on the clock – that’s data that can be used to track and measure certain business metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).

These measurements allow you to understand how the business is performing and how close you are to reaching  the goals.

The issue is, when you aren’t properly analyzing and reporting on this data, you won’t be able to effectively understand where your company stands so that you can make informed decisions moving forward.

Contact centre reporting and analytics can help you pinpoint problem areas, correct issues, and maximize call centre performance.

What Is Call Centre Reporting?

Call centre reporting is the means by which managers measure their call centre’s performance and efficiency.

Typically, a call centre report summarizes several important key performance indicators (KPIs), explaining what is happening within the organization.

These documents are periodically presented at meetings so that investors and other key members can stay informed about the status of the company.

Call centre reporting and analytics convert raw data into actionable information, enabling you to make informed decisions.

It’s your first day managing a call centre and the first data you see in the dashboard is:

• A staggering service level below 35%.
• An indicator that appears to be almost 50% of response rate.
• A decent average hold time compared to those in the industry—after you compared it using a benchmark tool.

Suddenly you see the average hold time skyrocketing as well as the after call work time. What do you do?

The most important thing to retain is that numbers are going to be your new best friend. Mastering the art of call centre analytics is not as difficult as you might think—the secret is to read the information as if you were reading a love story: person A meets person B, sparkles arise, and the romance begins.

In this case, person A and person B are everything related to call centre reporting and analytics, the sparkle is the strategies you design with this information, and romance is the new business intelligence.

Call Centre Reporting and Analytics

Call centre reporting and analytics will positively impact any organization if they are read and executed correctly.

Although usually considered the same, they are in fact different things. Reports allow you to read the strategy and help to understand key indicators, but for that you need to make sure that you have the best reporting tools.

Analytics give meaning to report information by allowing you to make long-term business planning or tackle different business-as-usual scenarios.

Going back to the welcoming scenario, you need to find out performance issues in the call center according to the results shown in the dashboard. You need to ask yourself, and your operational people, a series of questions to start mapping the situation:

• Is my team understaffed or are my agents underperforming?
• What is the call arrival pattern? What is the distribution of the call volumes?
• Am I staffing the different intervals with the correct number of people?
• Is this real-time or are we facing a historical behavioral trend?
• Are these unique callers or do I have a backlog?
• What are the quality results of the team’s performance?
• Do we have a streamlined process and flow in the IVR or during the call?
• Can our agents perform their job to the best of their capabilities?
• What type of engagement do we have with our stakeholders, or staff, or customers?
• What is the business competitive strategy?
• What are our customers saying about our customer service?
• Are we tracking the pain points and top contact drivers?

Benefits of Call Centre Reporting

Without call center reporting, it’s difficult to understand where your business stands so that you can make smart decisions moving forward. This can lead to staffing issues, unchecked customer problems, and overall business inefficiency.

Reports raise awareness for certain issues so that preventative and corrective actions can be taken. They also let you know when your strategies are working. But that’s not all.

Beyond general business visibility, reports can provide you with several benefits, allowing you to:

Enhance Call Centre Agents’ Productivity

A call centre reporting tool can gather information about your agents’ activities, making it possible for you to monitor them and give timely, relevant feedback.

You can track things like average wait time, how many calls were taken, resolution times, and even how many calls were missed during business hours.

With this knowledge, you can identify the root causes of problems and coach your call centre agents to be productive and successful in your organization.

Better Customer Satisfaction

Call centre reports can help you measure customer satisfaction and sentiment through surveys and interactions.

Gathering this valuable customer feedback allows you to better understand how to serve them and gives you insights into how to improve the customer experience.

Save on Costs

It may seem like the costs associated with call centre software outweigh the cash savings, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

By identifying trends and inefficiencies, call centre reporting and other software can help you optimize operations to reduce costs throughout the organization.

Contact Centre Metrics

In terms of reporting, there are a few data sets that provide more information about the situation. For example, reports on agent activity and agent status identify top performers and outliers and help to design coaching strategies that could elevate and calibrate the overall performance and productivity of the team.

KPIs such as average handle time (AHT), after-call work (ACW), and average hold time enable you to start digging into the processes and available resources of your team.

For instance, is there a need to provide a better knowledge base or more intuitive training materials? Is the team missing interactive or automated steps to use during and after the call time? Would more simplified flows help you improve metrics?

A cloud digital solution, powered by AI technology, supports agents with customer inquiries, decreases hold time, and improves customer satisfaction.

Think about going from 7 seconds AHT with around 3 seconds of hold time, to a 5-second call where customers are always greeted by an agent. No more call centre waiting music!

Likewise, when comparing the top and lower performers for call time, you can also find out if there is a silo culture impacting the quality of your service. Lack of engagement and communication has a great impact on any customer service structure.

Now, what about the IVR? There were a few questions related to the interaction before reaching an agent. In this sense, the abandonment rate can be highly impacted by a complex IVR message, leading to customers hanging up the call.

Although we believe callbacks and voice mails are a good option, sometimes they end up being the opposite, as they generate more call volume. More clarity and flexibility can improve customer experience and influence customer satisfaction.

Customer Experience (CX) Strategy

Operational call centre metrics and analytics and the correlation of data to understand trends and behaviors enable you to answer operational questions and deliver more detailed insights for a successful CX strategy.

A recent study showed that 74% of customers still prefer using voice to other digital channels. It compares a traditional channel, which requires more customer effort, with faster digital options, such as chat, for omnichannel contact centres. Who says you can’t have tradition and efficiency in the same sentence?

Sometimes the focus to achieve a more efficient call centre is not only on adjusting the metrics without reviewing anything else. The literal definition of efficient is “to achieve maximum results or productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense of energy”.

Making sure that processes, quality, IVR, knowledge base, and others are up to speed will have a deeper impact on performance improvement than adding more staff or putting even more pressure on the team you already have.

Improve the way people perform their job by making it more successful. For this to happen, it is imperative to work with more people and use the right tools for communication and collaboration.

Customers still appreciate a more human and closer interaction, which usually takes the form of an agent’s voice and empathy.

What Is Call Centre Analytics?

Call centre analytics refers to the process of gathering and analyzing data to uncover useful insights about your customers’ experience and call centre productivity.

This is typically done with a software tool that automatically collects the information and translates it into easy-to-read graphs and charts.

Oftentimes, this information is displayed on a live dashboard so that you can see in real time why certain metrics are lower or higher than they should be.

Analytics help you understand why problems are occurring, which helps you to easily correct them.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Talkdesk – View the Original Article

For more information about Talkdesk - visit the Talkdesk Website

Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.