You know that customer service is the backbone of your organization. Knowing where you stand with your customers and proving that value to stakeholders requires carefully crafted call center reporting that directly aligns with your organization’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Excel Spreadsheets won’t cut it anymore. Your executive team and call center agents need easy-to-digest, visual data that can help to inform their decisions and actions.
This is where organizing your contact center metrics into custom reports comes into play.
What is a call center report?
We’ve all suffered through dry presentations featuring data that is hard to tie to everyday actions and goals. To clearly depict achievements and opportunities, your contact center metrics should be displayed in a visually appealing way that clearly defines your achievements.
Call center reporting is more than just showing your stats. Custom reports need to meet your unique organizational goals by providing metrics that represent your values and tell the story of your team's impact. #Fonolo #CallCenter Click To TweetBy leveraging the wealth of data available in your call center software’s online reporting tools, you can keep a close eye on the productivity, performance, and quality of your overall customer service offering.
Some of the key metrics that you might choose to include in your report may detail customer satisfaction, hold times, inbound calls, agent productivity, and call resolution.
But the way you present these stats can make all the difference between showing numbers and graphs and telling a story that can help your operations improve. The first step is knowing the difference between a report and the analytics within it.
The difference between reporting and analytics.
Analytics act as the backbone of your reports and daily data. These are the stats related to things as they’re happening, and the raw data that’s gathered can then be used to inform your call center reporting. Your report will turn that raw data into KPIs to help track and measure performance over time.
Here are some examples of how raw data can inform reporting:
- Hold time is a KPI that informs reporting on abandonment rates and service level.
- Call length is a metric that informs reporting on First Contact Resolution (FCR).
- Number of calls is a metric that informs reporting on agent occupancy rate.
- Call driver is metric that informs reporting on sources of customer issues.
Analytics inform your custom reports, but your reporting will break it down into easily digestible and accessible tidbits of information that can be easily actioned and turned into goals for your call center employees.
Important call center KPIs.
You will want to regularly gather some of the more basic analytics, such as the number of calls your contact center receives each day and the average time duration of those interactions. But in order to truly display this data to company stakeholders, you’ll want to ensure that they are connected to your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). We’ve included some below to get you started.
First contact resolution (FCR).
This is the percentage of interactions where your agents can resolve a customer’s issue during the first call, chat, or email. A high first contact resolution (also known as first call resolution) means your agents are knowledgeable and highly effective in their work. On the other side of the spectrum, a low percentage means that there is room for coaching and training to improve your agents’ product and service knowledge.
Adherence.
This metric measures whether your agents are managing and adhering to their schedules. You can calculate it by taking the total time a call center agent is available and dividing it by the time they are scheduled to work. The resulting percentage will help you to identify whether your agents are where they are supposed to be, when they are supposed to be there. Adherence relies on status reports built into your call center software such as offline, available (idle), wrap up, etc. and as a total percentage for your contact center it directly informs workforce management ROI.
Customer feedback.
90% of customers believe that organizations should provide the ability for customers to provide feedback. Knowing how your customers feel about the service they received, and providing an opportunity to submit written feedback on the experience, gives a real human element to include in your reporting. Collecting this information can range from a simple scale (think “rate the quality of service you received today!”) to a more formal net promoter score survey.
Abandonment rate.
If hold times are too long and customers are abandoning calls, or they abruptly end the call or interaction, this can be directly attributed to customer frustration and a high rate should be seen as a red flag.
Agent occupancy.
Idle time can be costly when it comes to contact center management. To calculate agent occupancy rate, divide the workload (busy) hours by staff hours. A higher rate means less idle time. More idle time could mean low engagement among your agents, but zero idle time indicates your contact center runs the risk of agent burnout. Unhappy call center agents are not going to continuously meet your standards of service, so finding the happy medium in agent occupancy is key to overall contact center success.
Service level.
This is the average overall time it takes for your customers to receive service, starting from the moment they reach out to your contact center. This includes time spent on hold, and you may also include the number of calls during a specific time period. Common SLA’s for first touch interactions on phones/chats are under an hour, while emails may be 24 hours.
Call transfer rate.
A high call transfer rate could signal the need for a better routing system, or more empowered agents that can handle tasks without routing to a supervisor. Either way, this is definitely a KPI that you will want to align with to ensure that you’re offering a great customer experience.
Quality score.
This metric shows how agents are performing based on a series of metrics that are important to your company. Quality Assurance scores help drive training/coaching initiatives throughout the year on both a group and individual level.
Tips and best practices.
- You don’t need to reinvent the wheel! Your call center software often comes with reporting tools that you can use as a base to build off of.
- When it comes to your reporting, you need to Digest, Report, Learn, Repeat. Don’t get set in specific reporting methods. As organizational strategies shift and change based on customer demand, so should your contact center reporting strategies and KPIs.
- Do things, tell people. Once your reports are organized in an easy-to-digest manner, share them with everyone. Make your contact center a data-driven environment by sharing insights, wins, and opportunities with everyone from agents to executives.
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Fonolo Portal has analytics and insights built in to help you compile your call center reporting to help you make better-informed decisions. Get more info here.
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The Executive Guide to Improving 6 Call Center Metrics
Measuring and improving call center metrics can be a pain point for executives. Download our free guide to help you improve 6 key call center metrics.