Contact Center Design Starts With Reporting

Proper reporting Is A Key For The Contact Center Performance

When you are designing a Contact Center, one of the first questions you should be asked by the company installing the Contact Center solution is “how would you like your reports to look?” This way you are guaranteed to avoid one of the biggest frustrations Contact Center Managers may have.

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Why Start From The End?

This may sound a little “cart before the horse” since most Contact Center Supervisors and Managers in the U.S. and Canada, newly migrated to a new system, may not realize which reports are available in it. For those veterans of Contact Centers, the Supervisors and Managers should have a fairly good idea of what metrics/reports they plan on viewing post installation.

Right at the beginning of the data collection process and business process reviews, the reporting should be one of the first items reviewed and agreed upon. Contact Centers in the background can be making a variety of routing choices when determining where to route the next interaction.

Not all interaction routes are the same and, depending on how the interaction is routed, can have an impact on how it appears on the reports at the end of the day, week, month or quarter. Therefore, it is paramount to understand prior to starting the implementation what and how the Contact Center Management wants this information presented.

Can We Fix It Later?

Changing the call flows after the system has been in production is one way of accomplishing that task. But why would you want to make changes in your production system when you could have taken care of that at the start?

Over the years and many Contact Centers implementation projects we have been involved into across the United States and Canada, there has always been a common thread of frustration. The frustration stems from those who manage the system and those who have to report on it not being involved in the upfront discussions to request their reporting requirements. Now, those who run and analyze the reports have to piece together metrics from multiple sources.

Where The Data For The Reports Comes From?

Another part of the frustration results in that the data they are receiving is not accurate and the reports are flawed. Usually, this is not because the data doesn’t exist. It results in fact that for their solution they have incorporated multiple third-party applications or added additional applications with their own database. The data exists in multiple databases which makes it more difficult to combine and report on. In addition, if any one of those applications or third-party vendors updates or revises their data structure and tables, this can leave end users scrambling to fix the hole in data that occurred when the data formats/tables were updated.

Takeaway

A couple of things to consider when deploying a new Enterprise Contact Center:

  • The first one is that the company who is building the system has the foresight to recognize that reporting is essential to the configuration of the system.
  • The second is to find a system that natively has the additional applications you want to add, such as WFM, QM, Call Recording or Speech Analytics. Not only that native applications are related to the core system by design because they come from the same developer, but they also live in a single database.

Some modern Cloud Contact Center Solutions offer a number of advanced applications as a built-in functionality, as well as the instantly scalable architecture ans reliability incomparable to existing premise systems.

Our team is a reach of a phone call to answer your questions about Cloud Contact Center solutions. You can also learn more about Cloud 2.0 from the e-book “Not All Clouds Are Created Equal”. Click the button below do download your copy.

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