Business Intelligence, Dashboards and the Modern Call Center

Spreadsheets in the modern call center are more or less out; real-time reporting business intelligence (BI) via cloud-based call center technologies is in. It’s the only way to keep up with the faster pace of today’s world. Consumers and clients want answers and to make purchases, now. They won’t stay on hold or linger to hear the fifth repetition of Beethoven. They’ll leave, taking their money and loyalty with them.

This is where cloud-based call center solutions literally steal the show. Their dashboards are uniquely suited to meeting the demands of today’s marketplace, and do so in a way that’s advantageous for agents, managers, and C-level executives alike.

Dashboards and Call Center Agents

What if … a call center agent could know who was calling into the center and why, on-demand? That’s precisely what occurs with modern call center technologies. These platforms contain callers’ histories, ranging from abandoned calls to average handling times (AHT) and first call resolution (FCR) rates. Call center agents can use the data, in coordination with personally identifying information, to better meet the needs of callers and solve problems, faster.

The technology gives agents a greater capacity for empathy, too, which can make or break the relationship with the person on the other end of the line. Customers and clients stay with companies that know who they are and value them as people rather than as the means toward higher profit margins.

Using data is the smartest and best way for call centers to accomplish the goal, particularly at scale. A mom-and-pop operation might be able to know each of its customers individually, but this is impossible for global companies. Call center agents at these enterprises require instantaneous access to data in order to know who’s calling, from where, when, and why.

Dashboards and Managers

Call center managers may not often man the phones or other communication channels, but they do need visibility into which agents are using them and how well. For them, the dashboard is a place for real-time metrics and analysis. They can track performance throughout the day, monthly, quarterly and year-over-year—and without the aid of a BI consultant or data scientist.

Dashboards make it easy for managers to track the information that’s important to them and to keep the rest on a sort of back burner. They never discard the other data; rather, they employ it when they need greater insight into a pattern or specific call.

Managers then use the information to achieve operational excellence. With a streamlined dashboard and easy access to information, they can better allocate agents, time, and other resources. If inbound calls are low, managers can shift some of their employees to outbound work, and vice versa.

The same goes for yearly trends. By examining the data in real time and historically, managers can better meet expected demand. If demand is higher or lower than predicted, it’s a simple step to scale resources up or down via the call center platform.

Dashboards and the C-Suite

The C-suite has its own definitions of success and failure. They care about efficiency, productivity, innovation, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and profits. Many of those factors have hard numbers attached to them, and they are ones C-level executives can see at a glance with a customized call center dashboard.

Most of the time, though, they’ll ask managers for those data points. Managers have to “prove the case” when it comes to cloud-based call center solutions and resource allocation. And they can do it with today’s call center technologies. The platforms bestow not only better access to information, but also better reporting tools.

This means that supervisors and managers don’t have to spend hours, if not days, gathering data for a presentation to the CFO or CEO. Instead, they collect the needed data within the call center platform, convert it into an easy-to-read format, and disseminate a report. Besides saving managers time and frustration, faster reporting holds another benefit: improved decision-making. The organization can respond to conditions as they change, rather than after the fact.

Managers do this on a small scale with the agents they oversee. The difference here is that reporting is used to make an impact across the organization and within the industry vertical, which can lead to stronger relationships with partners, as in the case of a health insurance company using the call center service, as well as greater profit margins, and competitive advantage.

Cloud-Based Call Centers for All-in-One Intelligence

In the past, making strides in the three areas outlined above would have required multiple tools; additional people, including call center agents and data scientists; and a large investment in on-site IT infrastructure. That’s not the reality today, thanks to cloud computing.

The cloud enables call center solutions such as TCN’s to meet the exact needs of customers through customized dashboards and reporting tools. Customers don’t need a specialized data person; our reports are easy to create, use and understand. And, we take care of the IT requirements. Customers don’t have to worry about purchasing servers or infrastructure. We manage the concern with an elastic architecture that can be scaled up or down, as needed.

But don’t take our word for it. Request a demo of our cloud-based call center solution today and see for yourself.