Reporting --- Too much data, not enough actionable information.

Another inefficiency comes in the form of reporting. We’ve interviewed hundreds of call center managers over the years and still find many of them complaining about the inordinate time spent hand-assembling reports. Why is this? In this day of automation and instant access to information, it’s hard to believe we still have managers cutting and pasting data often from several sources. We even find some managers having to manually enter data!

Part of the problem is that every system in the contact center produces reports, dozens of them. There is no lack of data, there is simply too much.

Most vendors take a “one size fits all” approach, providing a canned set of reports to their customers. So, what the manager ends up doing is stripping out data from a number of separate reports and compiling a new report, usually using an Excel spreadsheet. Some of our customers have told us that they need to re-key the data by hand because they can’t get reports in an interactive format.

This is probably the number one waste of time in a contact center. It’s a shame because it is a relatively easy area to improve efficiency. How?

You can probably answer this yourself, but perhaps you rely upon an IT department, already overworked, to provide you with performance reports and every time you want to make a change you need to go back to them.

Usually a reporting module is included with the ACD you purchased. The problem is that these systems are locked alongside the ACD, behind closed doors and out of your reach. Even if they were accessible, there are security issues that make it difficult to get the kind of nimble reporting you need in the contact center. So, managers resign themselves to spending hours each week creating reports, repeating the process because someone else needs the information with a slight variation. Those “slight variations” can be a nightmare.

How can you create a nimble reporting structure that will adjust to your needs? First, do a little research on independent reporting vendors. Ask them where their software sits in terms of the ACD itself. Also ask how flexible their system is. Is it easily adjusted for those on-the-fly variations? What is the reporting structure? Excel? Crystal? Make sure it is standards-based and easy to maintain. A good independent reporting vendor can save your company thousands of dollars in time and energy, not to mention headaches!

The sample report above is for a collections department. Data has been taken from an ACD, a predictive dialer and from a collections database. Once created, reports should be easy to maintain and fine tune.

This is just the beginning

There are many more areas where inefficiencies can be squeezed out of a contact center with a little planning and input from the team. Remember that each inefficiency you identify may seem harmless by itself. But inefficiencies in one area will impact other performance areas.

Where there are people there are inefficiencies! However, these are also great opportunities to improve! Once you begin to identify areas where improvements seem possible, watch your team rise to the occasion. We mentioned earlier about the company whose employees actually created their own goals in terms of performance metrics. This is an opportunity to use your people to attach real numbers to those goals. That, along with a strong performance management and reporting system will take you a long ways towards achieving goals you may have thought impossible before. Isn’t that worth doing?