Five Ways That Call Reporting Is Transforming Contact Centres

James Emm discusses the benefits of call recording, while giving us his thoughts on how to pick the best solution for your organisation. 

The concept of call reporting may be nothing new, but today’s forward-thinking systems are a long way from the mere billing and call monitoring tools of yesteryear.

Harnessing the latest technology for the often fast-paced and reactive contact centre environment, the best reporting solutions bring greater insight into what’s happening on the floor right now, give you better control over agent and call activity, and deliver more detailed and accurate reports on demand.

The result? More informed and engaged contact centre management and teams, whether your focus is sales or service.

So, what should you be looking for in a best-fit solution for your business? We’ve picked five key features proven to deliver that all-important added value.

1. Real-Time Reporting

Legacy reporting solutions only produced historic reports, which took time to compile and so were often only processed by supervisors once or twice a day.

CTI technology now means calls can be viewed in ‘real time’ and reports quickly produced on demand. So you can see exactly what’s happening in your call centre at any given time, making it much easier to manage spikes in traffic, spot trends, and nip potential problems in the bud before they escalate.

2. Live Wallboards

Wallboards are popularly used in a range of environments, from competitive sales scenarios to tracking hunt group and departmental progress.

While wallboards have come under fire in high-pressure environments, used wisely, they provide key ‘information at a glance’ that helps keep a handle on wait times, queue length etc., as well as incentivising employees to manage their own performance.

3. Cradle-to-Grave Call Tracking

It’s rarely so simple that an incoming call goes straight to an agent and ends there; it often has to bypass auto-attendants and be sent to other team members or departments.

Your reporting solution needs to keep up, distinguishing an auto-attendant from a real person so your customer wait times are accurate, and be able to follow transfers between extensions and around hunt groups so you know who was involved in dealing with the customer.

4. Lost Call Capture

A missed call doesn’t have to be a missed business opportunity; the right reporting solution gives you have a chance to win it back.

As well as useful information about lost calls, such as the percentage of the total calls these make up, you can have a list of numbers to work back through at a quieter time in the day.

5. Triple-Play Flexibility

Contact centres come in all shapes and sizes and a solution often needs to work in a number of different hosting environments: on-site, in a data-centre or virtualised.

For contact centres, these means a greater capacity to manage big increases in call volume and the opportunity to set up training scenarios.