How Contact Centers Can Benefit From Enhanced Reporting

Corporations, organizations, and other large-scale businesses all use call centers to improve customer service. Managing a call center is challenging because of the huge number of call agents, customer queries, quality assurance demands, and the need for frequent reporting.

The organization has to justify the resources and funds it allocates to the department. It’s the management team’s role to report whether it efficiently utilizes the staff count, the center’s contribution to the bottom-line of the organization, and to determine whether they are solving customer queries efficiently and satisfactorily.

Because of its complex nature, contact centers must invest in systems that provide timely, comprehensive and accurate reports to assist the management team. Below, we’ll explore the benefits your organization’s contact center can enjoy from enhanced reporting.

1. Achieve A Customer-Based Analysis Of The Center

The sole role of a Contact Center is to solve customer queries, provide information about products, and support the overall operation of the business. Enhanced reporting should use metrics to measure how effective the call center is in achieving the overall goal.

Useful metrics to measure customer satisfaction include:

• Unresolved Calls: this metric shows the percentage of total customer issues not closed over a given period (for example, six months). If there are many unresolved calls, this is an issue that could need investigation to determine the reason behind it.
• Staffing VS. Actual Call Volume: this metric can show the management team whether there is a shortage or excess call agents. Additionally, it gives useful insights on whether call agents need training to improve their efficiency. This is especially true when the metrics show there’s enough agents, but call volumes aren’t being handled efficiently.

2. Gain a Competitive Advantage

Call centers support the main operations of the entire organization. A bank, for instance, competes with other financial service providers in the market. Poor resolution or total lack of customer issues, or an ineffective call center department affects the bank’s competitiveness in the market.

Use the following enhanced metrics to give your organization a competitive edge:

• Identification Of Risks And Opportunities: a robust reporting system from a provider like Aceyus can generate customer trends based on customer requests and service issues. An organization can, for example, use information about product demands or queries to predict future customer needs, creating an ideal opportunity to produce products customers will definitely buy.An increase in customer complaints could indicate poor service or deteriorating quality of products. Insights like these, gathered using enhanced reporting, can be used to identify risks and opportunities early, helping your organization establish dominance or unique selling points in the markets.
• Cost Optimization: high operation costs reduce the resources available to run new programs, expand, and invest for the future. With enhanced reporting, your management team can have an accurate overview of overhead costs, staff productivity and business leads generated from call centers.Such data provides an objective and scientific basis to determine the effectiveness of a department. The management team can then make an informed decision about allocating funds. For example, whether to add agents, open a new call center, or trim the wage bill.

3. Getting Actionable Data To People Who Need It

Organizations and companies operate in unpredictable environments. An effective reporting system is important to help management respond to the external environment, and to speed up the decision-making process.

Using real-time reports, call center management can inform other departments of customer demands. For example, if there is a spike in demand for a particular product, call center management can inform the warehouse department to stock up on that product.

The sales department can also benefit from the organization’s call center metrics. They can, for example, generate trends related to customers’ purchase journeys. Sales-related call logs can indicate customers’ preparedness to make purchases—such insights and actions can be used to qualify sales leads.

4. Effective Employee Management

An effective enhanced reporting system has a dashboard that gives overall and individual reports. You can see metrics such as individual productivity reports, downtimes, average response times, or the amount of sales generated per employee. Any deviation from the groups average can be addressed individually. This also gives the human resources (HR) department an opportunity to draft tailor-made training material for employees to meet them where they are in their various experience levels.

The organization can track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the call center agents. Using both individual and collective employee performance, the management can structure remuneration and incentive programs to keep them motivated.

5. Better Data Management

An organization’s ability to gather, analyze and store data improves its long-term prospects. An enhanced reporting system collects data and generates reports continuously. There is also increased reporting on either hourly, daily, weekly, or on an ad hoc basis.

The constant reports increase data points and insights, reducing the need to crunch huge reports at a single sitting. As a result, the management team can make progressive decisions and changes which impact the organization positively.

Conclusion

Contact centers are beehives of organizational activity and provide an opportunity for your organization to implement a reporting framework to measure its effectiveness.

With an effective enhanced reporting system, your organization can easily outshine competitors because it will help you to better manage your call agents, make informed business decisions based on objective data, and (most importantly) increased customer satisfaction.

Not only that—enhanced reporting sets in motion better collaboration between all departments in your organization.