Minimize Your Call Center Reporting Error

Call center reporting has a lot depending on not just it’s timeliness, but also it’s accuracy. A marginal error could cause a large percent in financial loss, customers lost and broken trust. If you haven’t taken a look at your reporting processes and security, consider the info below to know the importance of reporting and how to minimize error for it.

 

The importance of call center reporting

Reporting is crucial: It gives you a view into how your contact center is actually doing. It tells you how the center is performing, how effective your agents are and provide the framework for forecasting headcount, costs and revenue. Overall, reporting gives you a rundown of questions to ask in order to continue growth and improvement.

Through your call center reporting, you learn about your call center KPIs, or key performance indicators, such as:

• First call resolution (FCR)
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Abandoned call percentage

These metrics and KPIs are your lifeline. You need to have proper visibility into these, and that you’re getting the correct data, in order to ensure your organization thrives. 

 

How call center reporting usually works

With appropriate methods, reporting takes the many sources of call center data you have and remodels them into their respective KPI outputs. Systems, like your ACD or IVR, should produce the data needed that will eventually tell you your KPIs, like first contact resolution or Net Promoter Score. 

Data gets gathered and generally, requests for reports are needed from a team or manager. From there, normally an assigned contact center manager will work with the tools they have to be able to produce the needed reporting. 

Whether automated or by hand (which hopefully, you’re not doing), this is a general understanding of how call center reporting works. 

 

Where reporting errors go wrong

Unfortunately, there are too often cases of contact center managers working on reporting manually. This gives room for a lot of errors. Not only are you asking a single person to go through what is likely thousands, if not tens of thousands, of lines of data to organize it accurately into a spreadsheet, but you may also lack the checks and balances needed to ensure that person isn’t inserting some sort of bias.

After the manager has likely gone through it manually, you may still have lots of data silos affecting your reporting. The toughest part may be that this manager has spent so much time attempting to create this report that they’ve had no time left to truly get to an understanding on your necessary analytics. They can’t produce a clear picture nor offer a next best course of action if they’re expected to do this reporting on their own.

If you’re missing automation or rail guards in place to make sure your data is safe, accurate and holistic, you can’t be surprised when you start noticing errors with decisions based on your current data methods. Make sure your call centers are protected with clean and up-to-date reporting.   

 

How to make reporting better

Failure to plan means planning to fail, right? If you don’t have an appropriate plan in place for your reporting, you’re setting up your entire call center to fail. When initiating your reporting process, keep some of these best practices in mind:

1. Consolidate your data

It’s going to be challenging to get an accurate picture if you don’t have everything on the table. Bring in data from all sources collecting it. Whether it be data from multiple call center locations or omnichannel details, make sure you have a process in place to shepherd all of it in one place. You won’t be able to get a precise view into your company’s performance or where to take it next if you don’t see into all the details.

2. Keep it secure

No one wants an uninvited ogler, especially on what should be secure information and data. If you have items that aren’t ready for your customers and the world, ensure there’s something in place to keep it from being externally visible. If there’s data or reporting that isn’t meant to be seen by all levels of internal employees, check to see that the platforms you’re utilizing have capabilities for security access measures.

3. Data visualization for all

Now, some data that has made it to the finished line, you’ll want people to see and have at their disposal. Ensure that you have means to gather, organize and display your data in understandable and actionable means. Here, you can appropriately display dashboards for your teams to see what they should have access to in order to make data-driven and solution-oriented decisions.

4. Get on board with analytics

You can’t take a shot in the dark and expect it to hit a bull’s eye (at least, not every time). If you don’t have a process in place that puts analytics at the front end of your decision making, you’ll be leading your ship with lots of shots in the dark. Analytics, coupled with data visualization, will offer your teams the guidance you need to know what your next steps should be in refining and improving your efficiency. 

5. QA your process

Set a date and mark your calendar for an annual, or even quarterly, review of how your reporting process is doing. You don’t know what you don’t know, and when it comes to your call center reporting, you can’t afford to not know what’s going on there – or how your call center is actually doing. Gather the appropriate team to review with you on this date. 

If needed, pull a sample to test and see if there are inconsistencies that can be identified, or gaps in your reporting process. If you haven’t already, you may need to invest in a product to help with reporting automation, for ease, security and smaller error possibilities.

 

Call center reporting is one of the quintessential pillars for strategy and growth of a call center. It’s not just about historical data, but it allows you to know how your organization is doing and where you go from there. We see that error is possible and you need to be aware of how much error you currently have going on. Keep your data safe to keep the future direction of your company safe.

 

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