Is there a software package that enables call center managers with an easy management reporting
and ad-hocs on historical data. Examples: Who were our top performing agents this month, same month
last quarter, by product, by customer types, service ctlasses? Which Channels (phone, email, fax)
are most effective over time by Product offerings, by Time on Hold ?
There
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are several products that provide the type of functionality you are looking for. Your best
bet for recommendations on specific products to meet your needs is to engage the services of a good
telecommunications consultant. A great resource for referrals is The Society of Telecommunications
Consultants, www.stcconsultants.orgOne important piece of advice as you evaluate these products is to consider where your call center might be in a year or even two years. With the growing importance of e-mail, it's very likely that your center will need to incorporate e-mail and probably Web chat contacts soon. You should carefully consider this as you evaluate and choose reporting software for your existing call center. Failure to do so could render your purchase obsolete once you need to begin generating reports on Web-based agent performance.
Look for monitoring and reporting solutions that will handle voice and any future contact channels you may need to incorporate into your contact center. As you evaluate these products, it is important that you understand that a reporting system is only as accurate and as detailed as the data that is fed into it.
For example: Let's suppose you have a voice ACD from a traditional switch vendor and you have a separate e-mail management system. In order to perform relevant agent performance comparisons, you'll need to ensure that your reporting solution can get the same level of detail from both the voice and the email system.
You'll also need to understand how the voice and email vendors calculate the statistics you are correlating. Unfortunately, across the industry there is inconsistency in how statistics are calculated. For voice systems, "Talk Time" (the time the agent spent on the contact) is calculated from when the agent answers the phone until the agent hangs up. That is not the case for email systems. Is the equivalent to "Talk Time" calculated from when the agent receives the email or from the point that the agent opens the email? This varies across different systems.
Another option is to implement a single solution that manages multiple contact types (voice, e-mail, fax, chat, etc.) and provides unified reporting. This type of solution ensures that you are comparing the same statistics across multiple contact types.
For more information, check out searchCRM's Call Center/Customer Interaction Center Best Web Links.
This was first published in August 2001
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