A new class of reporting tools has the potential to revolutionize contact center performance
You're familiar with traditional call center reports, right?
Chances are your contact center uses some standard reporting tool to bundle statistics from your ACD into production reports for your supervisors and managers. And chances are, you're not entirely satisfied with the results, because production reports-while they are good for revealing trends over long periods of time-do have shortcomings:
For one thing, they are out of date as soon as they are generated. Worse still, the reports themselves aren't ready-to-use tools. They contain more information than your staff needs, not all of it relevant to improving performance, and that means someone in your contact center has to spend a lot of time figuring out what is relevant.
So using traditional reports to try to manage your contact center better ranges from woefully ineffective to counterproductive. Your managers labor at crunching the raw numbers and trying to draw conclusions, and the results of their efforts usually don't get done in time to be useful.
There is a better way
You'll be happy to know that there is a better way. It's called "analytics," and it's something new and altogether different. Analytical applications combine online analytical process (OLAP) principles with very specific knowledge, based on years of best practices, of what statistics are really the key indicators of contact center performance.
- An analytical application:
Pinpoints the key performance indicators in the sea of statistics that contact center systems generate
- Offers different views for different users, including front-line agents, based on their job requirements
- Provides an easy-to-use interface that lets users navigate through the information, looking at it from different perspectives and drilling down to identify root causes and truly understand what is going on in the contact center
- Includes tools for communicating with contact center staff and taking quick corrective action when performance falls short of business goals
Here's an example of how an analytical application for workforce management helps one call center employee meet performance goals. Let's say that the call center has an analytical application integrated with its workforce management software. A team leader is using the application to monitor the number calls her team is handling.
A dashboard tailored to the unique requirements of her job indicates that her team is 7 percent below the target level. Before she takes action, she needs to know whether the whole team is falling behind or just one or two agents are holding the team average down.
The application lets her drill down to individual agent performance, and she finds that most of her team members are actually handling more calls than they're expected to. But two agents, both recent hires, lag well behind the group. From that point, it is a simple matter of watching them handle a few calls and asking them how the work is going.
The team leader sees that both agents are slow with after-call wrap-up work, and that's what causes them to answer fewer calls. An experienced agent herself, she gives them some tips on handling the wrap-up work efficiently, and their call-handling average goes up. The team begins to reach and ultimately exceed its goal.
Job-specific analytics mean better performance results
Give agents, managers, and control desk staff the same kind of job-specific dashboards this team leader has, and the beneficial results on contact center performance are extensive.
Your supervisors and managers are more productive because they no longer have to crunch numbers to understand the contact center statistics. They spend that time doing what you pay them to do in the first place-coaching, supervising, and managing. And they perform those functions more effectively because they understand the root causes of agent and group performance, and they have tools for helping agents improve.
As for your agents, they perform at peak levels not only because they're better supervised and managed, but also because analytical applications help them monitor their own performance and measure it against their individual goals.