Your Daily Reporting Regimen is Killing You

As a contact center manager, there is no shortage of KPIs and metrics that you need to always be on top of and managing. The process starts with compiling, processing, and converting those metrics then moves on to delivering that reporting to upper management, floor supervisors, quality and training teams. Following that delivery is a near endless string of meetings with parts of each group to discuss and form strategies for improvement. After all of that happens, you may not have a lot of time left for much of anything else. Not only is it easy to fall into the trap of paralysis by analysis, but that can certainly be taxing on both your mental and operational resources.

Luckily in the year 2016, it doesn’t have to be this way. The technology exists to lift some of this burden off of your shoulders. Unfortunately, it’s not a Ronco Food Dehydrator, so you can’t just “set it and forget it” while hoping for the best. It can still make a tremendous impact though. There are many contact center technology providers who can plug and play with your current systems to provide you with customized analytics and dashboards specific to your own goals. This can create massive efficiency by helping get rid of many manual reporting processes, letting you focus on the job itself instead of reporting on it.

These emerging contact center technologies will also help you uncover issues you may not even know you had. Many of these analytics service providers have intuitive platforms that allow you to slice and dice your data from different angles to get new points of view on your performance numbers. One of the most powerful of these new innovations is Speech Analytics. While most contact centers hire entire teams of people to analyze the content of a small portion of the call volume, the advancements in Speech Analytics now allow you to analyze the content of every call, from every customer, and in real-time.

Another angle to attack the issue of the reporting overload from is that of focus. A study released by ICMI in 2013 suggests that with the ease of collecting so much data from contact centers during the course of business, many are doing so mostly just because they can. Instead of analyzing the metrics that are important to driving the business forward, most contact centers are trying to analyze EVERYTHING they collect, and often doing so very inefficiently. While there can definitely be value in finding certain nuggets of insight from your most obscure metrics, you get the most bang for your buck when you focus your analysis on the KPIs that drive your operational goals.

Find the metrics that are most important to your core mission. Look at the other ones, but spend your time focused on the ones that matter. Don’t get burned out spending all day digging through piles of data to find the insight, find a tech solution to get that weight off your shoulders. Sit back and take a deep breath. The future is now, and your contact center’s analytics and reporting need not raise your blood pressure.