Call Center managers face challenges and problems everyday. There are tools that will help the manager reduce and avoid some of these problems. This article talks about some call center challenges and the reporting tools that will help the manager.

1. Reporting Tools to Solve Call Center Challenges
February 2014
There are many challenges in the day of the contact center manager. This short list of problems
is just some of the challenges a manager faces. Reporting tools may solve or at a minimum
reduce the impact of these challenges.
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Performance Measurements for agents and groups
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Product / Services awareness
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Goal Adherence
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Remote Management
Performance Measurement is the aggregated report detailing the agent and contact center
performance across multiple channels. The contact center is in contact with the customer
through voice, email, chat, customer service tickets and outbound calls. The agent and contact
center maybe handling the voice well but lacks in other areas. Managers need to know which
specific area the contact center, group and agent are not performing well, are meeting and
exceeding goals and seeing the change in contact trends.

2. For example this report combines Voice, Email and Chat state time. There are some agents
doing more on Voice then email or chat. However, not seen on this image, is the total time for
voice, email and chat. This contact center customer contact is about half voice, one third email
and the rest chat. Comparing this trend to email and chat from the previous year the voice contact
has dropped considerably.
This call center manager is watching the customer contact trends and is keeping agents trained
and coached so the contact trend is handled with good customer service. One concern for this
manager is the agents inability to communicate accurately with the customer.
Product / services awareness is an on-going challenge within the contact center. New products,
advertisements, services, customer service rules, to name just a few are brought to the attention
of the agent. It is then the responsibility of the agent to maintain that knowledge and be able to
communicate with customers accurately and timely. To be fair, an agent has many tasks and
having to be aware of frequent changes is difficult.
A contact center LCD screen with the appropriate group level details will help the agent when
working with a customer.
In this example VIP customers were scheduled to book rooms and agents were to remember this
customers name, spelling and business. This allowed the agent to react faster to the customer
requests. There are many examples of agent brand awareness either helping or hurting the
contact center business. Agents receive a document alerting them of a change or they go through

3. a 30 minute product/service introduction and now they are supposed to know it all. Keeping
them aware by displaying that content helps them remember.
Goal adherence is not an easy metric to keep track of. Managers can keep track of calls accepted,
abandonment rates and service levels, but what about the goals for the interval or the day?
Managers need to be aware of the agent state they are in for all states they can be in for the day
or week. How many times have they been in ACW above the goal for each call and what amount
of time have they been above that goal? Being aware of these goal variances (count and
duration) provides the manager with agents work methods and tactics.
We often talk about trends in our contact centers and we should keep track of the threshold
trends as well as our daily call volumes.
All KPI’s with threshold settings can be tracked to determine how well the agent, group or entire
contact center has performed against the goals for those KPI’s.
Managers are mobile and can work outside of the office. While this occurs keeping up-to-date of
the contact center status and performance is difficult to do. Getting calls, text messages and
emails from team leaders is not enough to be fully aware of the contact center status. In addition,
productivity and performance changes occur when the boss is out of the office. This is
especially true in the smaller call centers according to some of Spectrum customers.

4. Mobile reporting to tablets and smartphones gives the manager complete real time data anytime
they want that report. Managers are able to decide on the data they need or want to see. They no
longer have to rely on the word of the team leaders who many times are extremely busy. The
real time information will remind managers of the areas that need focus when the return to the
office.
Spectrum is a leading provider of Unified Contact Center Reporting. Contact Spectrum today to
discuss your contact center challenges. For more examples of reporting visit our website and the
products page. http://www.specorp.com/products
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Dan Boehm
VP Sales and Marketing
Spectrum

5. dboehm@specorp.com
+1 713 986 8839

6. dboehm@specorp.com
+1 713 986 8839