Resources Library Curated Reports
Ready-to-use insights to manage your call center better

Most often, be it work or even something as personal as choosing the right pair of shoes, there is this perpetual question at the back of our heads: "Am I doing things in the best possible way?"

The only way to be sure or close to being sure, is to have data-backed insights. Afterall, what can’t be measured can’t be improved, right? But, it’s important to know what to measure. Metrics are valuable only if they help you view the big picture of your business and arrive at actionable plans for your team to execute.

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In the case of a call center, reports should help answer the following questions:

  • How well is my agent’s time being used?
  • Is the first call resolution good enough?
  • Why is there a considerable increase in abandon rate?
  • At any given time, are there more than an average of 3 to 5 customers in queue?
  • Am I understaffed or are my agents underperforming?

Often, a call center supervisor or admin tends to get lost in this overwhelming heap of metrics. It is easy to lose sight of what’s most relevant and impactful for their team of agents to look at.

At Freshdesk Contact Center, we’ve come up with a set of five default, ready-to-use reports that would help you

  • zero in on the bottlenecks of your team (Spot the problem)
  • figure out what’s working and what’s not (Identify the cause)
  • give one-to-one feedback to your agents (Collaborate and solve the problem with your team’s help)

Freshcaller Curated Reports

These reports are simple to interpret but heavy on insights. They can be shared with your team to help them reflect on where they stand and motivate them to get better at what they do. This next section will help you learn how to make the most out of these reports!

Reports available currently:

Agent Performance Report

Agents are the ones in direct dialogue with customers day in and day out. This makes it important to set high standards in the quality of the experience they deliver. The best way to measure if every agent is on par with the expectations of your call center is to regularly keep a check on their:

1. Efficiency: speed of answer, call handle time, and after call work time

2. Productivity: call distribution by agents and individual teams

3. Time Management: percentage of unanswered calls and transfers

4. Product or Technical Expertise: average hold time

 

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Agent Performance Report

Even though a call center agent can be measured based on multiple metrics, there are some key indicators, such as the number of Unanswered Calls and Hold Time, that need to be set right before focussing on more nuanced ones. And this report dives deep into these metrics alongside the ones mentioned above.

Every unanswered call is bad news

Let’s take the case of an agent having an unpardonably high share of unanswered calls to his name. Is he taking too much time to solve each customer query? Should his conversation be more precise so that he can attend to more calls? Or are the agents mapped disproportionately—fewer agents where there is more demand? Whether it’s a staffing issue or the question of an agent’s way of working, these reports help you identify roadblocks and push you towards getting them sorted.

Stop losing customers to hold time

 

Close to 60% of customers lose patience if they are put on hold for more than a minute, says Velaro in their call center KPI survey.

A direct indicator of an agent’s efficiency is the hold time. It shows how proficient an agent is with the product. Maybe your agent has been looking in all the wrong places to get answers. Ensuring that agents have access to product training docs would help them respond better to customers.

Small checks like these would help you identify if an agent needs to work on speed of response, ramp up in terms of product knowledge, or read up on FAQs, and also set the stage for you to revamp your staffing strategy.

Call Volume Analysis

The primary function of a call center is to handle the huge volume of calls that come in and more importantly at reduced costs. Keeping track of the call volume trend helps you:

  • Foresee growth in your customer base (Hire proactively)
  • Reorganize the strength of each team (Optimise resources)
  • Stay prepared for the most demanding time of the day, week, month and year (Prioritize your time smartly)
  • Learn and improve the IVR, call queues and business hours to make the most out of a day (Adapt and scale)
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Call Volume Analysis

This report is built around the most important call metrics that would help you stay vigilant of your business’s call volume and forecast agent demand. Key metrics like the Call Volume Trend and Call Volume Outcome help you track the growth of your customer base and consequent call load.

Call Volume Trend

This report typically helps you get an idea of the share of incoming and outgoing calls each month. And not just that, this report goes a step further in pointing out the most hectic days of the week. On the hectic days you can advice your agents to just stick to ensuring that every call that comes their way is answered, while keeping their follow up calls and demos for the less hectic days. Also, as a supervisor you can schedule your weekly sync-ups and team meetings for the days that generally have lesser demand.

Call Outcome

 

67% of customers hang up (abandon calls) because they are frustrated that they can’t reach an agent on time, says American Express’s survey for the Customer Happiness Week.

As the name suggests, this metric is a reality check on how many of your calls are being abandoned, missed and completed. The data in this report lets you exactly know if your call center is equipped enough to handle the calls (outcome) that come in everyday. For example, if you find out that the number of abandoned calls per month looks unhealthy, probably your IVRs and call routing need a second thought. Revamp your call handling customization of your call center software to reduce the abandon rate and missed calls.

Call Analytics

The previous report that we discussed will help you get started with knowing your call center better in terms of the current trend and call load. But to stay on top of your customer’s needs, you need to look further into your call center’s performance. If knowing the volume of calls and doing the math right to handle it is one thing, doing it in the best way possible is another. The call analytics report plays a huge role in helping you do it in the most optimal way with metrics like:

  • Total calls by status
  • Average handle time
  • Call distribution by Queues
  • Average IVR time
  • Average wait time
  • Answered vs Missed calls
  • Longest wait time
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Call Analytics

Running your business’s phone support by keeping a close watch on these metrics gives you a strong sense of where your call center is heading in terms of performance. And ensuring that at least, metrics like Call Distribution By Queues and Answered vs Missed Calls are in good shape is quite important for any growing business.

Call distribution by Queues

By knowing how much workload each call queue faces on a daily basis, you can get an idea of the number of agents who need to be assigned for a particular queue. Let’s say, this report shows that the billing and finance call queue gets the maximum number (30%) of phone calls for the month followed by the shipping enquiry queue (12%).

Making sure that the number of agents handling the billing queue is more than the number working on the shipping queue is the least that has to be set right. Going one step further, you can also look into why the billing department ends up receiving too many calls. Small changes like adding more information to the invoice, creating a page with the FAQs specific to billing queries on your site and rewording your billing related emailers to read more clearly can cut down most of your calls and save you some bucks.

Answered vs Missed calls

This ratio best represents the crux of how well you are performing as supervisor/admin. Since you are the one responsible for setting up the call queues, assigning agents to different teams based on their area of expertise and setting up the IVR and routing rules, this ratio reflects on how resourceful you are. Let’s say for most days of the month, the report shows that the number of missed of calls are more that the number of calls answered. Clearly, you need to put in more thought while setting up your call center’s features or you need to figure out if your agents aren’t performing well enough to meet the expectations. Either way, with the insight from this report it would be easier for you to identify what needs to be changed to help your call center work better.

 

While these Curated Reports help you get started, there are more such metrics and reports as a whole to help you grow into a doing better business, scale with as much efficiency as possible and reach a point where none of your customer calls go unanswered. While you are busy getting better by the day and smarter with these insights, we’ll be doing our bit of research to curate more such ready-to-use reports in the near future. Do watch this space for more updates.