The Best Call Center Reporting Practices

Call center reporting is an essential component of any contact center as it is used to determine KPIs and track the performance of the business. This is a daily challenge for most contact center managers even until today, so here are a few call center best practices you need to leverage when tracking, analyzing, and presenting reports.

What is Call Center Reporting?

Simply put, call center reporting takes the raw data about your contact center, and turns it into legible, usable information. Call center reporting empowers you to make smarter, better decisions, decisions driven by data. The raw data your call center generates can be used to create Key Performance Indicators or KPI. These indicators can serve as valuable tools as you analyze the direction of your company. They give you a better sense of where you are doing well, as well as insights into ways in which your call center could improve.

Why is it Important?

The value of a call center report lies in the ways you can use the data it generates. In particular, this information can help you maximize both call center efficiency and customer satisfaction, two of the most important factors for any contact center.

It should go without saying that the satisfaction of your customers lies at the heart of any call center. An unhappy, or unsatisfied, customer can quickly become a lost one. Taken together, the data you gain through call center reporting can provide you with more than just discrete data points or abstract goals. Rather, by analyzing KPIs, and adjusting your practices accordingly, you can gain a roadmap of sorts toward happier, more satisfied customers.

Similarly, a call center analysis report can provide insights that can lay out a path toward greater efficiency. And, of course, greater efficiency is itself often a path toward greater customer satisfaction as well—a customer whose time isn’t wasted, who receives answers quickly and easily, is likely to be a happy one.

In particular, there are several metrics or KPI that are particularly important to pay attention to if you are looking to increase your call center’s efficiency. These include but are by no means limited to average wait time, average answer speed, average handle time, average after call work time, average call abandonment rate, occupancy rate, self-service accessibility and quality and percentage of calls blocked.

Best Practices in Contact Center Reporting

As your call center begins to generate analysis and reports, there are a few important factors that you should keep in mind. These pointers will help ensure that the reporting you end up with is accurate and useful—junk reports aren’t good for anyone.

First and foremost, it’s important to focus on the KPI and call center metrics that are most crucial for you and your firm. With literally thousands of different ways to sort, analyze, and categorize data, it’s far too easy to get lost in a paralyzing sea of information. Rather than attempting to quantify and analyze everything imaginable, focus on the KPIs that are most relevant. Metrics that we’ve already mentioned, such as averages of answer speed, wait time, handle time, or call abandonment, can really help you get a better sense of the strengths and weaknesses of your contact center.

In addition, it’s important that you integrate and collate data from different sources and systems. It’s not enough to have information from just IVR, emails, or call-logs on their own. You need to be able to see these metrics side by side and see the points where they interact and influence each other. Only when your company’s data is taken together and viewed holistically will your call center reporting be truly useful. Finally, make sure that the call center reports you ultimately generate are actually legible. If your end result is a virtually incomprehensible mound of numbers, then it will be quite difficult for you to gain insights from your reporting. To put it another way: there’s little point in generating a report if you can’t understand it easily enough to act on it. Fortunately, however, there are plenty of software services that can help you keep track of your entire call center in a user-friendly, accessible way.

Contact Center Reporting and Software

While all this data analysis can seem like a daunting task, with so much information to process, and so much raw data to compile. At first glance, this seemingly-complex statistical and analytical work might even feel overwhelming.

There’s no reason it has to be, however. Your call center reporting can be greatly assisted through the use of top-notch call center software, such as VCC Live. For over 15 years, VCC Live’s call center software has been put to use to help clients in over 50 countries worldwide. With over 10,000 users spread throughout the world, its software can hold its own against any of its competitors. What’s more, VCC Live has years of experience working with small, mid-size, and large firms, as well as with multinational corporations. This means that its team has the skills and knowledge to provide your company with the best solutions possible.