Top 5 Call Center Reporting Methods to Follow

Call center reporting is the only way to know how your contact center is performing. From daily performance reports to identifying seasonal trends, reporting is an art form in the call center that defines the past, present, and future of your organization.

While measuring various call center metrics and KPIs is crucial, how you report them matters. Discover the top 5 call center reporting methods, and follow our best practices to make them successful.

What Is Call Center Reporting?

Call center reporting involves taking key data and insights from contact center systems and putting them into specific reports.

Your Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system can compile these reports for you from the data they store.

After, you have the opportunity to create call center reporting graphs and charts to make the data easier to read and understand.

Top 5 Call Center Reports You Need to Have

You can have a lot of different reports in a call center. For every metric and KPI you track, you can have a report. However, there are only a few key metrics you should focus on.

When you’re running your own in-house or outsourced call center, the following types of reports are the ones that truly highlight your contact center’s performance.

1. Daily Summary Report

Daily summary reports help you make adjustments constantly, and keep your contact center on the same page.

Include the following KPIs and metrics in the columns of your daily summary report:

• Incoming calls: How many calls came in that day?
• Handled calls: How many of the incoming calls were answered?
• Abandons: How many calls were abandoned without an agent answering?
• Skills: What skills were needed that day?
• Average handle time: What was the average handle time for the center (from call start to post-call memos)?
• Service level: How many calls were handled at a given time?
• Average speed of answer: How long did the callers wait before an agent answered?
• Longest delay: What was the longest wait time?
• Occupancy report: How many agents were working that day, and what were they doing?

2. Snapshot Reports – Monthly Volume Trend

Keeping records of your call volumes is crucial for call center workforce management. 

Daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal snapshot reports on call volumes can give you invaluable insight into what to expect for the future.

When there’s a common trend of more incoming calls in a period of time, you can schedule more agents on the floor to receive them.

Similarly, if there’s a slower day in the week, you know that you don’t need that many people on hand.

Bonus tip: If you’re a visual person, having monthly volume trend reports as charts and graphs is a great idea.

3. Interval Trend Report

Looking at seasonal and monthly trends gives you great insight. However, looking at interval trends is what you really need to schedule your agents.

If you don’t have robust workforce management, these reports are important so that you know how to staff accordingly during high call volume times. This is especially true for internal call centers.

Call center interval trend reports look at call volume for a defined interval. 

Usually, these intervals are one hour. However, some clients like to see 15-minute intervals. If there is a definite pattern to these intervals, then we can staff accordingly. 

Just be careful about how you schedule lunchtimes!

Bonus tip: Adding service level reports to those intervals can add an extra level of information.

4. Agent Occupancy Reports

This type of call center reporting is important for managers and agents alike.

Agent occupancy is the time that an agent is in a working state, taking physical calls.

The question is, which type of agent occupancy should you include in your report? And should you be looking at occupancy by program, skill, or occupancy by agent?

The answer is all of the above!

Each of these factors are going to correlate with each other, especially regarding billing. 

If you’re new to the industry, occupancy reports should be included with your daily summary. 

Additionally, have the conversation about whether after-call work should be included in your occupancy reporting. This can vary by program.

5. Agent & Customer Sentiment Reports

While customer sentiment reports are crucial for how your call center’s performing and what the reputation of your business is, don’t forget about your agents.

Agent sentiment reports let you know about efficiency issues, training needs, and employee satisfaction. You’ll know who needs help, and which employees need more support.

Taking the time to seriously consider your agents’ needs is employee engagement best practice. And following best practice will help get you closer to the results you want while keeping your agents and the customers they serve happy.

Usually, you should check agent sentiment reports once a day, and customer sentiment reports once every three days in a call center.

Tips to Become Successful at Call Center Reporting

Keeping track of data and organizing it into reports is a great start to call center reporting. However, certain best practices can truly make your reporting successful:

• Agents above numbers: It’s important to realize that numbers are only numbers. The happiness of your employees should matter more than what’s in the report in most cases.
• Benchmark key statistics: You can look at information. However, it won’t mean much without context. Instead make sure to also keep benchmarks for your reports. Whether you take these benchmarks from past performance reports or you come up with a new (but reasonable) KPI is up to you.
• Use a dashboard: Using a unified dashboard to track and display your data can make your reporting easier for you.
• Simplify complicated call center reports: Everyone can easily get lost in reports with lots of numbers and data. If you’re trying to display too much, try toning it down. Summarize or cut unnecessary things from your reports to make them readable and effective.
• Use graphs: Reading visually pleasing reports is always easier.
• Don’t be biased: Using reporting to confirm your suspicions can seriously harm your call center.
• Compare the reports: If you have two or more call centers, make sure you compare your reports. See if there’s anything you can learn from the differences and similarities, and adjust your methods accordingly.
• Review the data: Making the reports is only the first step. Once you have the reports, you need to review and analyze them. Afterward, you can adjust the workflows and processes your contact center uses.

What’s the Difference Between Reporting and Analytics?

A lot of people use reporting and analytics interchangeably nowadays. However, they’re not the same at all.

Reporting is the process of gathering raw data and presenting it to show what’s happening at your call center.

Analytics is reading the reports to identify trends and patterns, and give you actionable insights.

 

Now, we want to hear from you!

What kind of reports does your call center prioritize?

Let us know in the comments!