The Best Call Centre Reporting Practices

Dorottya Márton of VCC Live introduces us to call centre reporting, before sharing lots of best practices.

Call centre reporting is an essential component of any contact centre as it is used to determine KPIs and track the performance of the business.

This is a daily challenge for most contact centre managers even today, so here are a few call centre best practices you need to leverage when tracking, analyzing, and presenting reports.

What Is Call Centre Reporting?

Simply put, call centre reporting takes the raw data about your contact centre and turns it into legible, usable information. Call centre reporting empowers you to make smarter, better decisions, decisions driven by data.

The raw data your call centre generates can be used to create Key Performance Indicators or KPIs. 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 centre could improve.

Why Is Call Centre Analytics Reporting Important?

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

It should go without saying that the satisfaction of your customers lies at the heart of any call centre. An unhappy, or unsatisfied, customer can quickly become a lost one.

Taken together, the data you gain through call centre 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 centre 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 KPIs that are particularly important to pay attention to if you are looking to increase your call centre’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 Call Centre Reporting

As your call centre 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 KPIs and call centre 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 centre.

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 centre reporting be truly useful.

Finally, make sure that the call centre 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 centre in a user-friendly, accessible way.

Contact Centre Reporting and Software

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 centre reporting can be greatly assisted through the use of top-notch call centre software.

This means that your team has the skills and knowledge to provide your company with the best solutions possible.

Author: Guest Author