Call Center Reporting: Your Guide for 2023

Complete and accurate call center reporting is critical for proper call center management, effective agent performance, and improved customer experience.  

Call center managers must be able to track, manage, analyze, and understand all customer interactions to provide the best possible service and uncover areas of improvement. 

Fortunately, modern call center technology for analytics and reporting has made this easier than ever before. The best call center reporting platforms not only consolidate important data, but also provide actionable insights regarding the product, services, and even company-wide policies. 

What is Call Center Reporting?

Call center reporting provides call center managers with operational, customer and people visibility. It takes the various streams of raw data flowing into the call center and transforms that data into insightful reports. 

These reports often include key call center metrics like:

• Average Abandonment Rate (ABN)
• Average Handle Time (AHT)
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
• First Contact Resolution (FCR)
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This data is received from various call center technologies including Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Workforce Management (WFM) systems, speech and text analytics, or manual agent and customer reports. 

Why is Call Center Reporting Important?

1. Improve Customer Service

Customer experience has a huge impact on customer retention, sales, revenue, brand reputation, and more. Understanding why your customers behave in specific ways helps organizations reduce customer support needs and improve overall service. 

Real-time call center reports provide information about:

• Customer sentiment: How customers feel about a product, service, or organization
• Customer effort: How much effort is required by customers to complete a service request
• Customer retention: The rate at which customers stay at a business
• Service-level metrics: The speed of agent responses and abandonment rates 
• The quality of recent support interactions

2. Stronger Agent Performance

Call center reporting can also help call center managers evaluate: 

• CSAT (customer satisfaction)
• Adherence to company guidelines
• Agent success (including average handle time, average talk time, first call resolution, and more)

By reviewing your organization's progress with daily, weekly, or monthly reports through KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), you can be confident that your team is achieving any set goals. If a problem occurs, you can use these reports to see where you might need more resources and training, or even if the issue lies within the product or service itself. 

3. Optimizing Cost

Call center reports can measure the cost to serve a customer organized by inquiry type, team, and site. This typically involves call centers synthesizing multiple data sources to determine an overall amount.

However, some call center reporting platforms like Operative Intelligence automatically pull macro and micro cost insights that reveal: 

Customer pain points and what they cost the business

• What causes increases in handle time and cost and how to reduce it
• Opportunities for engineering teams to improve the product 
• The return on investment (ROI) of potential changes 

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Types of Call Center Reports

There are many different types of call center reports, but some of the most common include:

Call Abandon Reports

The call abandon report helps call center managers understand how many customers are abandoning calls even before connecting with an agent.  These reports show the number of abandoned calls, how long customers waited before abandoning the calls, and the percentage of abandoned versus answered calls.  

These reports can be used to help call centers identify and address common reasons for call abandonment, such as long wait times or high customer effort. 

Call Detail Reports

The call detail report (CDR) is a comprehensive report that provides a detailed history of all the calls that were made to and from a call center. This report includes information such as the call date and time, the callers' phone numbers, and the call outcomes (e.g., answered, missed, or hung up). The call detail report can be used to identify trends in call center behavior and help call center managers improve customer service. 

Metrics in these reports could cover:  

• Average handle time
• Average talk time
• Average hold time 
• Average speed of answer
• Average abandonment rate

Agent Activity Reports

Agent activity reports help managers monitor their agents' progress. They report an agent's daily productivity and their effectiveness in resolving customer issues. 

An agent activity report can track metrics including:

• The number of incoming calls being handled
• The total handle time for all those calls
• Average handle time per call 
• Average talk time 
• Average hold time 

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Agent Availability Reports

The agent availability report shows the number of available and unavailable agents in the call center at a given time. It displays each agent's name and user ID, as well as their automatic call distributor (ACD) state. It also states how long the agent was in that particular state.

Examples of the ACD states are:

• Available
• Unavailable
• Wrap-Up
• Sign-In
• Sign-Out

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Call Center Reporting Metrics & KPIs to Track

There are various call center metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) that can be measured and reported. 

Service Metrics

Service metrics are often a culmination of metrics that will appear on KPIs along with measures like CSAT or NPS. They can include: 

• Average Speed of Answer (ASA): The average amount of time that it takes for a customer to have their call answered. This remains one of the industry-leading metrics for call center performance. A typical target is 80/20, where 80% of calls are answered in 20 seconds or less. 
• Average Abandonment Rate (ABN): This measures how many calls are abandoned in a queue before they are answered. Additional metrics can also include calls offered and calls answered which are used to determine the abandonment rate.
• Average Hold Time (AHT): This measures the amount of time that customers are being put on hold. It can be measured at the agent, team, center, and macro levels.

Customer Metrics

Call center customer metrics track the satisfaction and happiness of callers with the call center. Some common customer metrics include:

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score: This is a measure of the customer's satisfaction level with the interaction they received. The way it is measured can vary and call centers often survey multiple different aspects of their interaction. A  common question is, “‘How satisfied are you with the service you received today?” with a rating from 1-5.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): This metric measures how likely callers are to recommend the call center to others. A high NPS score indicates that callers are likely to recommend the organization to their family and friends based on their experience with the call center. 
• Customer Effort Score (CES): CES measures the amount of effort required by the customer to complete their service request. The higher the effort, the lower the customer satisfaction. It’s determined by post-interaction surveys. 
• First Call Resolution (FCR): This measures the rate at which customers are having their inquiries resolved on the first interaction. It’s defined either through manual quality assessments or via surveys sent to customers, which unfortunately can be subjective and inaccurate. However, next-gen call center reporting platforms like Operative Intelligence determines FCR for 100% of interactions without the need for manual analysis or surveys.
• Sentiment: Sentiment analysis uses machine learning and AI to pull subjective elements from text to determine the feelings and opinions of the speaker. This can help organizations understand where and when customers are having a negative experience while using their product or service. It’s a more objective measure and it can be scaled across all interactions. 

Cost Metrics

Cost metrics track how much money call centers and organizations are spending to service their customers and how effectively that money is being spent. 

Costs can be broken down into both direct costs and indirect costs. Common call center cost metrics include: 

• Cost Per Call (CPC): This is the amount of money spent to answer each call. It’s determined by taking the total cost of wages and overheads and dividing it by call handling volume. CPC should be monitored to ensure call centers are getting the most out of their investments. 
• Cost to Serve: The metric is the overall cost of service. It can vary depending on the level of reporting sophistication, but typically it is reported by inquiry type, team, location, and as a macro trend. 
• Average Talk Time (ATT): This is specific to phone calls and measures the amount of time that the agent and customer are talking or, more specifically, times when the customer is not on hold or the call has ended and the agent is completing other tasks. 
• Occupancy Rate: This measures the amount of call center staff available to handle calls. It’s determined by taking call handling volume and dividing it by total call center capacity. This helps call centers determine how effectively they are using their call center personnel.

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How to Set Up Your Call Center Reporting

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1. Set Goals

The first step in setting up call center reporting is making measurable goals. While improving overall customer satisfaction is a great goal, breaking it down into smaller, actionable steps makes it easier to track success. So instead, you may want to decrease AHT in your team by 8% next quarter. 

Once you’ve set your goals, you can begin to determine which call center metrics and KPIs to track and what center processes to adjust to see success. 

2. Make Data Accessible

Accessible data empowers call center agents and management.  With call center reporting dashboards, agents and management can quickly access call queue metrics, call center performance, customer sentiment analysis, and more. They can prioritize tasks, review areas for improvement, and better understand any coaching or feedback they’re receiving. 

Access to the appropriate data can also enhance cross-departmental collaboration and promote a data-driven culture in the call center. 

3. Use Dashboards for Visibility

Dashboards can be a valuable tool for call center managers. Dashboards organize call center data and reports in one easy-to-read place, making it easier to consolidate and identify trends and patterns.

Dashboards can also be customized to show only the information that’s critical to the viewer. So while an agent might view their personal performance dashboards, a manager might review call center metrics on service costs or CSAT. 

4. Pull Actionable Insights

Without clean and configured data, reporting platforms can waste time reviewing irrelevant or inaccurate data.  And while several reporting solutions can gather data and organize metrics, the real power comes from real-world insights and implementable suggestions.

Operative Intelligence does just that. Unlike traditional call center reporting tools, Operative Intelligence automatically transforms an organization's existing call center data into applicable, actionable insights. 

The no-code automation identifies both macro and micro insights including: 

• Why customers contact support at scale
• Customer pain points and what they cost the business
• What causes increases in handle time and cost and how to reduce it
• Drivers of negative customer sentiment and satisfaction
• Opportunities for engineering teams to improve the product 
• Where performance variability is being driven at a team and agent level 

Users can identify the highest-impact opportunities to improve the customer experience, reduce costs, and boost operational efficiency. 

5. Support Your Agents

By tracking call center metrics, you can identify which agents are struggling and then provide them with the resources they need to improve. If you notice that an agent has a high call abandon rate, you can provide them with additional training on how to handle callers. Or, if you notice that an agent is consistently receiving high customer satisfaction scores, give them a bonus or recognition. 

While these are simplified examples, call center reporting can advance both agent and coach effectiveness. 

6. Use the Right Tools

While there are several call center reporting tools available, it’s important to find the right fit for your organization. Call center reporting is only as good as the tools you use to generate the reports. 

The right tool will help you set goals, make data accessible, use dashboards for visibility, support your agents, and support positive changes to call center operations. Plus, it should have a quick implementation time and improve ROI across the board. 

Call Center Reporting Challenges

When it comes to call center reporting, there are a few challenges for call center managers to understand.

Lack of integrated data across channels: 

Many companies have call centers that act independently from the rest of the company. Instead of forming a strategic plan around one cohesive platform, organizations have to manage several solutions to each problem and then make sure all of their departments are in constant communication about the results. 

These silos produce a lot of data, but there's no system in place to bring all that information together so management can use it. 

Inability to link analytical insights to actions: 

Reporting tools often use analytics to generate insights but they can’t translate those insights into implementable recommendations. 

So while they might know how many customers are calling them or how many calls were abandoned on a specific day, operations managers don’t have access to the root drivers of customer contact, how to address these drivers, and the ROI of potential changes. 

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The Best Call Center Reporting Tools

Fortunately, Operative Intelligence addresses all of these challenges with a full-service platform perfect for visionary call center leaders. 

1. Operative Intelligence

Operative Intelligence transforms a business’ existing call center data into real-world, actionable insights. The platform analyzes 100% of inbound interactions and uses actual customer words to identify the root causes of inquiries. 

Additionally, call center leaders can see the volume, cost, and sentiment of every inquiry, so they know which changes will drive the highest impact improvements in their customer experience, operations, and frontline performance. They can track these opportunities over time on demand.

‍Features and Benefits:

• Provides a single source of truth for all call center insights so teams can focus on taking action and not mining data for answers.
• Companies can see exactly how their agents are performing and where they need to focus on coaching through easy-to-read dashboards. 
• Call center managers can understand the exact reasons why customers are reaching out and use this data to drive change and reduce costs related to customer service.
• Provides executives with irrefutable data about how to make meaningful changes in the organization, tied directly to revenue.

‍Learn more about Operative Intelligence.‍

2. Dialpad

Dialpad's cloud-based call center gives users access to customer information as well as provides the tools needed to optimize the customer experience. Dialpad provides features like the real-time transcription of calls, live sentiment analysis, and coaching for agents.

Dialpad offers call center reporting capabilities. It helps businesses get a comprehensive view of their call center operations and make data-driven decisions about their customer service strategy.

‍Features and Benefits:

• Tracks call volume, call duration, call abandonment rates, and customer sentiment scores.
• Monitors agent performance with comprehensive reports on handle time and average speed to answer.
• Provides access to call recordings so managers can review customer and agent interactions and identify improvement areas.

Pricing:

• Standard: $15 per user per month
• Pro: $25 per user per month
• Enterprise: Request for a custom quote

3. Zoho People

Zoho People is a cloud-based Workforce Management solution that helps organizations to manage their employee data and track employee attendance. The platform was designed to help organizations manage their employee data and track employee attendance in a timely manner. 

Features and Benefits:

• Offers a secure and centralized database that makes it easy to access and modify data.
• Reports on employee attendance, schedule shifts, and plan breaks. 
• Organizations can track employee hours worked and generate reports on overtime and staff productivity.
• Employees can view their leave balance, submit leave requests, and receive approvals online. The leave management module also allows managers to approve or reject leave requests with just a few clicks.

Pricing:

All prices are billed annually.

• Essential HR: $0.83 per user per month
• Professional: $1.66 per user per month
• Premium: $2.5 per user per month
• Enterprise: $4.16 per user per month
• People Plus: $8 per user per month

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Improve Your Call Center Reporting with Operative Intelligence

Call center reporting is a vital tool for call centers to measure performance, identify areas of improvement, and take action. 

But not all call center reporting platforms are the same. With next-gen reporting tools like Operative Intelligence, call center managers can show C-suite executives irrefutable data on how to make meaningful changes in the organization – from customer service to product updates to company-wide policies. 

Ready to drive true changes at every level of your business?

‍Book a demo with Operative Intelligence today.