The Right Way to Do Contact Center Reporting

Many good things come out of contact centers, but reporting is generally not one of them. Given the large number of systems – automatic call distributors (ACDs), interactive voice response (IVR), computer telephony integration (CTI), customer relationship management (CRM), email response management, chat, dialing, recording, workforce management, quality assurance, surveying, speech analytics, just to mention a few – each of which generates lots of reports, contact center managers and supervisors are often buried in data but eager for actionable insights. Contact centers need two primary categories of reports to deliver this information:

1. Real-time alerts and notifications that let managers (business or IT) know when there are issues that need immediate attention – red-flag events that someone needs to take care of immediately
2. Historical performance and trending data that can be presented in the way the user wants to see it and that can be changed to meet evolving business needs

As a result of recent innovations in analytics and dashboard technology, contact center leaders no longer have to struggle with reporting. There are now flexible real-time and historical reporting tools that can adapt to changing business needs. If your reporting systems are limited or not giving you critical and timely data and alerts, consider a third- party reporting solution that consolidates data from multiple operating systems and identifies the problem areas. These solutions go by many names, including reporting systems, contact center performance management (CCPM) or business intelligence (BI). They are characterized by their ease of use and ability to collect and deliver the appropriate data on a timely basis. Even better, when used properly, they pay for themselves by enabling managers to improve the performance of their departments.