When organisations select a contact centre solution, reporting should top the list of must-have features. It is a critical function that allows for the monitoring and measuring of the effectiveness of agents.
While it needs to be used alongside customer satisfaction ratings and other KPIs, dashboards and reporting deserve to be given a lot more focus and attention, says Viktor Gajodi, CEO of contact centre platform provider Buzzeasy.
“In any business, without metrics, you’re flying blind. Without reporting, a contact centre is not really a contact centre. Reporting allows you to evaluate performance and shows you where you can improve. You may think you are doing OK, but it’s the reporting that tells the real story.”
Taking Decisive Action
With its long experience of developing contact centre solutions, Gajodi feels that Buzzeasy has an in-depth understanding of what’s needed when it comes to monitoring performance and giving both agents and managers the real-time and detailed information needed to improve the customer experience. Over the years, Buzzeasy has evolved its dashboards and reporting, adding functionality that enables supervisors to take decisive action when required and managers to shape their strategy and approach.
Buzzeasy comes with dashboard templates customised to suit the contact centre’s needs. There are dashboards for agents and supervisors, as Gajodi explained. “It’s important that agents can see their statistics, information on the group or team, or the campaign or program they are working on to monitor their own performance. As they can be customised, managers are in full control of what the agent can see.”
Virtual Wallboards
In addition, it’s possible to have virtualised wallboards, with performance information that traditionally was displayed on large format displays in the contact centre, appearing on the agent’s screen. This capability is particularly useful when agents are working as part of hybrid or remote teams. Managers can customise dashboards for themselves too. Buzzeasy also provides additional functionality that can allow managers to monitor digital and voice conversations in real-time and to intervene when they deem it necessary. They can listen to conversations either with or without the agent being aware of their presence.
Alongside this, they can communicate in a digital channel (like webchat) or to speak directly with the agent, which enables them to make suggestions on how to deal with a particular engagement as it is happening. They can even jump into the conversation – on a digital or voice channel – to provide additional support.
These options can be used to elevate service levels through pro-active escalations of dialogues that might otherwise not be resolved within the same customer conversation, but would require additional interactions, impacting customer satisfaction, and increasing resolution time for a single inquiry. They are useful in training new agents and helping them get up to speed as quickly as possible.
Not Reinventing the Wheel
Buzzeasy comes with a whole historical reporting capability. Here too, the parameters can be set to give managers the detailed information they need to make informed decisions, adjust responses, reallocate resources, and identify where further training or supervision may be required.
As you’d expect, many options are made available covering operational efficiency, engagement on digital channels and calls, resolution levels and relative performance of individual agents and teams. But while managers can pull out all the statistics they like, what they really need is to get some interpretation of what the data means.
Here, Buzzeasy has seen no reason to try and re-invent the wheel. Instead, it provides the capability to export the raw data to business intelligence tools such as Microsoft’s Power BI. This opens the potential to combine the historical contact centre data with information from other sources, such as CRM applications.
A 360-degree View
Being able to do this allows organisations to assess quality of service delivery and contact centre performance in more depth, said Gajodi, and that can make a real difference. “With these tools, management can make better decisions. They can decide what data is driving the contact centre. They can make sure that information on dashboards is the right information and that it’s presented in the right way.”
Buzzeasy continues to update its dashboards and reporting based on customer and partner feedback. It recently added capability to view all key statistics across all queues as an option for its supervisor dashboards.
“What we try to do”, said Gajodi, “is make everything possible and provide a complete picture of all contact centre operations. With agent and supervisor reports and the ability to export and analyse data with Power BI and other tools, they can get a 360-degree view, make better decisions, and focus on improving their service levels.”
