A thriving business focuses on its customers and adapts to fit their needs.
So, if you want your business to flourish, you must review every process for your clients’ benefit.
You need to offer the best possible services and/or products, and deliver stellar support once a purchase has been made.
Of course, this translates into how well your call center operates.
So, how well does your customer center operate?
If you’re unsure what to answer or have a vaguely formed idea, you need to work on your call center reports and analytics.
The reasoning is simple: the more you know about your call center, the better management decisions you’ll make, and the more satisfied and loyal your clients will grow.
Remember this because it’s the magic triangle that leads to success.
In this article, you’re going to learn more about call center reports, dashboards, and analytics and how these can help you improve your business.
Let’s dig in.
Why are report engines instrumental to business?
According to a study conducted by Bain & Company, 80% of businesses say they deliver ‘superior’ customer service, but only 8% of customers agree.
As baffling as this disparity is, it’s not at all unexpected.
Many businesses make empty statements simply for marketing purposes.
However, you cannot boast about the efficiency of your call center without having a set of comprehensive reports to support your claims.
Or you could, but you would be doing your business an enormous disservice.
Call center reports — and thus report engines — are therefore instrumental to your business as they provide you with a simple X-ray of your call center processes.
Reports and analytics, understood as the intentional act of continuously extracting critical information from your call center interactions, can help you improve your customer satisfaction rates.
Think of it this way: day in and day out, your call center generates piles of customer data that are packed with insights.
You can decide to extract these valuable data points into intelligence reports by using complex analytics powered by reporting engines.
Or you could flush out all this data and choose to base your management and process decisions solely on your intuition.
Needless to say, the second option is a clear path to disaster.
Customer data is gold for your business.
Using the right reporting engine, you can mine every speck of insight there is.
Those insights can then guide your decision-making process towards that superior call center all customers wish for.
It’s simple, and with a reporting solution such as The Reporting Engine, it can even be easy.
How can business intelligence dashboards improve your success rates?
Business intelligence dashboards are, in essence, data-based overviews that account for your customer center’s efficiency.
These gather information on waiting times, transfers, call resolutions, interaction length, and satisfaction rates based on feedback.
By glancing at such a dashboard, you’ll be able to peek into the minds of your customers and extract general guidance that can help you improve your operations.
Of course, the goal (and benefit) is to give your customers what they want and thus push your business forward.
What’s more, dashboard analytics will also empower you with relevant agent metrics to lead to a happier workforce.
But let’s break each of these benefits down so you can better understand why having a call center analytics system with a comprehensive dashboard is crucial.
Streamlined processes
Your call center management decisions directly affect your customer-facing interactions.
The reverse should be true as well.
In fact, when you use customer interaction data to tweak your processes, you can consistently improve your business results.
For example, suppose your waiting times and drop-off rates are on the rise.
In that case, you can take action by fine-tuning agent shifts to have more people on-call or by creating better protocols for faster transfers.
Of course, this is just one of the multiple benefits a streamlined process can have on your business.
Management decisions will reflect into business-essential metrics, from customer to employee satisfaction and everything in between.
Have all relevant data in one place
A call center reporting solution with an intelligent dashboard will help you get a birds-eye view of the most critical data in your call center.
Instead of gathering reports, information, and feedback from various sources and systems, report engines ease the job by extracting everything of interest in just one place.
In the case of The Reporting Engine, data and insights are presented in an engaging and attractive visual dashboard.
This way, call center managers can easily preview and analyze vital data in no time.
What’s even better, such dashboards enable cross-departmental collaborations, allowing for more complex analysis.
Plus, you can easily customize your KPI dashboards to fit the goals and needs of your call center, providing tailor-made insights.
More satisfied and productive call center agents
Call-center agents are your first line of interaction with your clients.
Needless to say, keeping your agents well-rested and overall happy with their job is essential to running a thriving call center.
To ensure your call resolution rates only go up, you must make sure your agents work in balanced shifts and have access to the support they need.
Plus, you’ll be able to identify their strengths and weaknesses and implement training sessions to help them get better in critical areas.
This approach enables a more personal connection with each employee, deepening the sense of trust.
In the end, getting better insights regarding your agents will lead to more actionable ideas that will ultimately reflect how well your call center is performing.
Better organizational transparency
A well-rounded dashboard will help everybody in your organization stay on top of their game.
And, since everybody will be doing a great job, your call center success rates won’t be late to rise.
With this in mind, look for a call center reporting solution with a dashboard accessible across various mediums so that everybody can access it instantly.
The Reporting Engine, for example, generates reports from multiple data sources, for various locations, for multiple business units in one place.
Plus, it requires no programming whatsoever by any user.
With a single click of a button, all stakeholders across your call center can have 24/7 access to a modern dashboard filled with relevant insights.
How to get started with call center reports and analytics?
If the benefits above convinced you of the importance of having your call center analytics mapped on an intelligent dashboard, you must be curious about what you should do next.
To make the most out of call center reporting and analytics, you need to follow a few essential steps.
Because you cannot expect to be successful without planning ahead.
Establish your goals
In order to see long-lasting results in your performance metrics, it’s not enough to aim high.
In fact, you must act at a detailed level and adopt a granular approach to goal-setting.
As you already know, call center performance depends on many factors, which is why your goals should be broken down into smaller objectives that cover each area.
For example, you should have different goals for your employees and a different set of goals regarding customer interactions.
Make sure you set realistic and quantifiable goals so that you can assess just how long you’ve come in your journey.
Select the right metrics to support your goals
Once you have your goals, you need to also think about the specific metrics you’ll want to tackle.
Working with the right metrics will ensure that you accurately assess your success.
Plus, having a close eye on specific KPIs will help your decision-making process improve on a day-to-day basis.
Call center reporting engines such as The Reporting Engine recommend that you track metrics such as:
- Average Wait Time
- Customer Satisfaction
- Call Drop Off Rate
- First Response Time
- Call Volume Trends
- Call Handle Time
- First Call Resolution
- Quality of Recent Support
- Top Agents
- Customer Retention
- Support Costs Vs. Revenue
Access multiple data sources
Modern call center reporting is synonymous with flexibility and inclusiveness, allowing multiple data sources to merge into a single report.
This is especially important in this day and age when your clients can inquire about your business across a wide range of digital platforms.
In fact, we’ve reached a time in history when 40,000 search queries are performed every second on Google alone.
And we haven’t even talked about social media or third-party groups and forums.
So, if you want a performance dashboard that can indeed be a game-changer for your customer support, you need to select one that can cover data from across all these platforms.
This way, you’ll make decisions based on a complete picture of what your audience needs and wants, moving towards a higher level of support.
Call center reporting solutions such as The Reporting Engine will allow you more insight from your multiple data sources so you can run your business more efficiently.
Empower your agents
Prepare your agents to succeed by giving them access to all the data, info, and decision-making tools they need to consistently provide an exceptional level of support.
If your call center agents are out of touch with the statistics that influence your success rates, they will fail to deliver results.
Not to mention that without a proper context of each client’s inquiry, they won’t be able to offer a satisfactory resolution.
An intelligent analytics dashboard will help your agents stay on top of such issues.
Still, it will also help you understand how your agents are performing.
You, too, will be equipped with all the knowledge you need to keep your agents motivated and highly productive.
And this is particularly important since a survey conducted by Gallup discovered that 13% to 16% of the workforce is actively disengaged.
Leverage the power of predictive analytics
Having a look at what has been happening or what’s happening right now is essential.
But digging into what might be happening is what can set your call center apart from other businesses.
Predictive analytics can become the secret weapon in your call center reporting repertoire.
With it, you can find trends and set benchmarks that will layout a path to better results and more effective strategies.
By using predictive analytics, you can fine-tune agents’ shifts according to call volume trends.
You can also discover how long your clients are willing to wait or pinpoint the time of the year during which they’re more inclined to use your customer support.
All of these will enable you to manage your resources more wisely and turn in better metrics.
Tips to boost your call center reporting approach
Not all call center reporting strategies are built equally.
In fact, quality call center analytics are tough to achieve.
However, if you really put thought into your selection process, you’ll end up with highly efficient call center reporting.
How do you do that?
By following these steps in a cycle:
- Keep track of relevant metrics in an intelligent visual dashboard
- Make data accessible across all departments
- Choose a flexible, customizable solution such as The Reporting Engine
- Experiment with different data visualization solutions and implement learnings
- Pay attention to feedback from your employees and customers
Ready to make the most of call center analytics?
If you’re committed to helping your call center succeed, then you must commit to a report engine that is genuinely performant.
The Reporting Engine might just be it.
Request a demo today and see if it can fulfill your needs.