Making the Most of Your Contact Centre Wallboards

Emma Moulinié of Diabolocom shares the varying ways in which you can present information on your contact centre wallboards, discussing everything from content to visuals.

Present in all contact centres, wallboards are giant screens that allow key information on the activity of the centre or a given team to be displayed and monitored in real time.

Installed in such a way as to be visible to all agents and supervisors, these dynamic dashboards are tools for sharing information, making decisions and managing not only performance but also team motivation.

Here are some good practices to follow if you want your wallboards to really help you manage your activity and keep your teams involved as much as possible.

Display the Right Indicators

Contact centre solutions are machines for producing statistics and KPIs. The objective of a wallboard is not to be exhaustive, and even more so since beyond seven or eight simultaneous visual indicators, the human brain cannot effectively comprehend all of the information at once…

It is therefore a question of highlighting a limited number of indicators and information that will make sense for supervisors and agents because they allow them to:

• Visualize and understand the state of the activity at a glance
• Make quick decisions adapted to the situation.

To do this, your wallboards must integrate very factual real-time indicators such as the volume of incoming calls, the number of calls on hold, the number of agents connected at a given time.

This operational information allows the supervisor to immediately detect a call peak and ensure that the number of connected agents is sufficient to absorb the load.

If this is not the case, they may call back some of the agents on break or redirect some of the traffic to another group of agents.

Trend indicators also have a place in your wallboards because they allow you to see at a glance where a team is in relation to its objectives or to compare the performance of the current week with that of the previous week or the best week of the year.

More and more call centres are also displaying customer satisfaction indicators on their wallboards and making them a subject of emulation as part of a team challenge.

The choice of the “right” indicators depends very much on the context. There are no golden rules that work for every context. It is up to each manager/supervisor to identify the information and KPIs that are most relevant to them and their team.

Also, the manager must ensure that those indicators they decide to bring into the wallboard are understood by the team members and have a positive impact on their morale.

On this point, all team leaders will confirm that it is much more effective to display indicators with a positive connotation, such as the first call resolution rate or the percentage of satisfied clients. This is as opposed to negative or stigmatizing indicators, such as the rate of missed calls or the team with the worst results.

Customize and Regularly Upgrade Your Wallboards

For a very long time, wallboards were standard tools offering all contact centres and teams the same indicators. To modify them, it was necessary to use technicians, which entailed costs and delays.

That’s ancient history. Today, in many solutions, you build the wallboard that suits you by simple configuration and you make it evolve as often as you want or as often as you think necessary.

You can thus proceed by test-and-learn to build wallboards adapted to each campaign and/or to the particularities of the team for which it is intended.

Thanks to modern widget systems, you can define the place and size of each element on the screen, add or remove indicators in a few clicks.

For more customization, you can also add images (logo or other) or messages.

If you launch a challenge of a few hours to break the routine, nothing prevents you from creating a specific wallboard and displaying in real time which group is in the lead, encouragement messages and the key reward for the winners.

The wallboard, still too often perceived as a control screen intended for supervisors or as a top-down stimulation tool, thus becomes a real tool for animation and healthy emulation, contributing both to performance and to maintaining a good working atmosphere.

Maximize the Visual Impact of Your Wallboards

In a call centre, no one lives with their eyes fixed on the wallboard. Agents are focused on their own screens and call processing, while team leaders focus on coordinating operations and providing individual support to agents.

The wallboard must therefore provide everyone with information that is useful for them and be understandable at a glance.

To do this, it is essential to avoid visual overload and to ensure that everything displayed is perfectly readable, in terms of size and colour, by all members of the group.

For agents to have a good reason to refer to a wallboard without distracting them from their tasks, indicators and key figures must be updated regularly, if not in real time, and text messages must change.

Also, there is nothing to stop you from relaxing the atmosphere by posting a cartoon or joke. Visual alerts are an excellent way to focus everyone’s attention on what is important at a given time.

In the Diabolocom solution, you can define very simply thresholds from which an indicator changes colour.

Respecting the colour codes known to all – typically green when everything is going well, orange when the situation is tight, red when all resources must be mobilized – enhances the impact of each indicator and allows everyone to immediately understand the decisions taken and the changes in priority.

Author: Robyn Coppell