Call Center Reporting: Types and Benefits

Call Center Reporting is the process of converting raw data into insightful reports.

Depending on the type of report, you can understand the agent’s performance, evaluate key performance metrics and make informed decisions to heighten customer service.

The idea of call center reporting is to identify and resolve the issues on a granular level so that robust strategies can be built to drive customer engagement.

This article will cover what call center reporting is, its benefits, the types of call center reports etc.

What is Call Center Reporting?

Call center reporting entails the process of converting raw data from the Automatic Call Distributor (ACD), Interactive Voice Response (IVR), and Workforce Management (WFM) systems to insightful reports.

These reports are based on some particular call center metrics, such as:

• First Call Resolution is FCR, which measures the ability of an agent to resolve a customer’s inquiry in the very first call
• Average Wait Time, i.e., the time a customer spends waiting in the queue for a callback
• Customer Satisfaction, is a measurement of how satisfied and happy the customers are with the products and services of a business
• Adherence to Schedule, which is the factor determining whether the agents are working the entire time they are scheduled to be working for
• These reports can be converted to graphs or charts to analyze your business’ performance for a specific period.

While creating the reports, it is necessary to ensure that they comprise exact formulas for calculating the metrics to gather more relevant and reliable information.

The reports should also clearly represent the metrics, enabling managers to quickly identify the metrics that can be further analyzed.

Call Center Reporting helps managers view accurate and precise performance metrics and tie other data streams to the call center data to arrive at business-wide, customer-centric metrics.

Difference between Call Center Reporting & Call Center Analytics

Most often, call center reporting and call center analytics are used interchangeably.

Call center reporting can be considered the first step of analytics. The report contains data that helps you derive meaningful insights to drive performance. However, they are not the same.

The following is a detailed comparison:

• Call center reporting turns raw data into simplified summaries to better understand the call center’s performance. In comparison, call center analytics identifies the trends and patterns in the report and offers actionable insights.
• Reports give you data but require agents to ask questions like ‘how’ and ‘why.’ Analytics shows you the reasons behind specific problems.
• Reports highlight the latest calling campaign showing lower customer engagement, whereas analytics point out why the hit rate was low.

Top 8 Types of Call Center Reports

There are eight different types of call center reports, and these are:

1. Agent Activity Report

The agent activity report is the one that offers information about all the call center agents. Managers can utilize this information to ensure that the agents execute their assigned tasks.

The agent activity report comprises historical data and other information regarding the daily output of the agent. It is, therefore, also called the agent detail report.

The report includes statistics like the number of incoming calls, total handle time for those calls, average handling time, and the shortest and longest handle time.

2. Agent Availability Report

The agent availability or status report shows the individuals’ names and user IDs along with the ACD state. The report states how long an agent has been in each state.

Some of the ACD states are available, busy, signed out, unavailable or idle, break, and wrapping up.

These reports are also called historical reports or trace reports, and they are used to see when an agent signs in and sings out. This helps in evaluating schedule occupancy and adherence.

3. Call Abandon Report

This report shows the percentage of abandoned inbound calls and details of the time before abandoning.

Some reports can include additional details like the average wait time before abandoning a call or the longest a customer waited before they left a call. This helps in identifying gaps and evaluating where most customers were lost.

4. Call Detail Report

A call detail report offers the start and end time of a call, how long it was in the queue and the caller's details. The report shows the caller id, the total hold time, how long the call lasted and when precisely the call took place.

You can use this report to get an overview of the escalations or cross check the discrepancies in claims by a customer or an agent. This report holds high value for the quality assurance team as well.

The experts can track down and monitor the poor performing agents, defective knowledge management systems and training opportunities. The goal is to enhance agent productivity.

5. Call Direction Report

A call direction report or call transfer report points to the number of calls made or received across a specific direction or channel over a certain period. This helps you understand the demand of the call center.

There are three directions, much like in an answering service: the total number of inbound calls received, the total number of outbound calls made and the internal calls to the other departments.

Additionally, the total, average and longest call durations can also be viewed in this report.

6. Inbound Call Summary Report

This is the time interval report. It comprises statistics for all the inbound calls to the call center over a period such as a week or a month.

It includes data like the total calls, the answered calls, abandoned calls, talk time and the agent’s speed of answering the call.

This report also acts as a base for call center forecasting. For instance, mapping the call arrival pattern in a day can enable you to identify the expected call volume or the peak hours.

7. Queue Activity Report

The Queue activity report gives insights into customer behavior while waiting in different queues within a set time. This report also includes the number of calls handled across each queue.

You should ideally look at the key metrics, such as the longest and average wait times before the agents answered a call.

8. Service Level Agreement (SLA) Report

An SLA is an agreement between the call center and the client, containing the required service standards.

Usually, in most call centers, 80% of calls need to be answered in 20 seconds. The SLA report lets managers check how and why the SLA was breached. SLA offers further insights into gaps apart from real-time monitoring and dashboards.

Key Benefits of Call Center Reporting

Here are some of the primary benefits of reporting for your call center operations:

Increase in Customer Service

Customer experience influences customer feedback and retention, revenue, sales, the center’s reputation and more.

Real-time call center reporting helps track customer success, customer demands and customer sentiments. Getting an idea of why your audience reacts the way they do will let you keep customers happy. It will also encourage them to keep supporting your business.

Improves Agent’s Performance

Call center reporting can be used to evaluate the interaction between the agents and the customers and whether they adhere to company guidelines and overall success.

You can also ensure that your agents are meeting the set goals by using daily, weekly, or monthly reports to measure the critical KPIs.

Moreover, if there is an operation-wide issue, you can use these reports to check if the agents need access to more training and tools. Sometimes, the problem lies with the system, which can also be detected.

Optimizes Costs

Keeping a call center operational is a challenging task. It is impossible to look into each area of the center, especially offshore BPO, to identify small ways to save costs.

Call center reporting, on the other hand, provides insights to streamline the work from top to bottom.

For instance, if there are too many steps in the call flow, you can simplify the process to save time and effort. One must remember that overlooking the small inefficiencies often leads to considerable costs over time.

Call Center Reporting Takeaway

Tracking call center data is crucial but to make proper sense, depicting this data in an understandable form is even more important.

And call center reporting is precisely that.

With the assistance of a good call center reporting tool, businesses can track the entire call center performance and enhance customer experience while meeting strategic goals with data-driven decisions.