The Ultimate Guide to Contact Center Reporting

Senior Writer: Akarsh Jain

Published : June 4, 2024

Want to enhance your contact center operations, elevate customer service quality, and improve agent performance? You cannot do that until you know what is going on in your contact center— what’s working and what’s failing. And that’s where contact center reporting can help.

Contact center reporting inherently leverages a data-driven approach to make decisions. And data-driven organizations are 23% more likely to acquire customers, and 19x more likely to be profitable.

But what are contact center reporting and analytics, its critical metrics, and its benefits? We’ll also look at the top 5 proven solutions to help you ace contact center reporting. Let’s begin.

Expert Advice

When creating a contact center report, focus on key metrics, actionable insights, and clarity to maintain its effectiveness. Make sure to configure your reports according to your stakeholder's needs so they can easily gauge the relevant inefficient points. Remember to review and update the metrics of your report from time to time so they are in tune with your goals.

What is Contact Center Reporting?

Call center reporting refers to the process of gathering, arranging, analyzing, and demonstrating contact center data to gain insight into customer service performance and related loopholes. Contact center data usually includes calls, emails, social media, and chats.

• This kind of reporting helps contact centers easily assess Net Promoter Score, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, service efficiency, and agility in operations.
• Compare these reports with the existing historical data to best utilize these reports and understand how aligned you are with your goals.

Benefits of Effective Reporting

Effective reporting lets you dive into your contact center performance and eliminate any inefficiencies before it gets too late. Here are some other major benefits of reporting –

1. Enhances customer service

Companies witness an 80% increase in revenue when there’s an improvement in customer experience and service. That’s why you must deliver great customer service. Not doing so affects customer satisfaction, sales, revenue, and customer retention.

Contact center reporting can help you significantly here. It tells you about your existing service quality and whether your support team is able to fulfill current customer expectations. Using this information, you can efficiently eliminate inefficiencies and drastically improve customer service.

2. Improves agent performance 

Contact center reports enable you to monitor and measure agent performance via metrics like first call resolution rate, average handling time, handled call number, and call escalation rates. Looking at these metrics, you can easily spot high-performing agents to appreciate their efforts and assign them more complex tasks.

With this data, you also get the opportunity to identify struggling agents and coach them for better productivity and efficiency.

3. Lowers and optimizes operational costs

Contact center reports make reducing and optimizing your operational costs (expense on call center software and agents) a lot easier. Allow us to explain. Suppose you notice a drop in the first call resolution rate. You can improve this metric to lower costs.

How? By ensuring that your agents resolve most of the query calls in one go, eliminating the need for multiple calls. Hence, low cost per call.

4. Level up resource planning

With contact center reports, you can significantly improve your forecasting capabilities and, hence, resource planning. How? Because these reports give you access to historical data that you can utilize to correctly predict the potential call volumes and staffing requirements.

Based on this data, it’s easier to plan resources and optimize agent schedules to fulfill upcoming demands. Being proactively prepared reduces customer wait times, improves service levels, and increases customer satisfaction scores.

5. Offers real-time business health insights

Another major benefit of using contact center reporting is that it enables you to share real-time customer data with your relevant call center agents, like product managers and engineers.

• Product managers get insights into the product life cycle.
• Engineers get information about customer’s perceptions and reactions to product upgrades.

Receiving information instantly can help them start working immediately and gain a competitive edge. You can then handle issues better without getting any major hit on customer satisfaction.

Key Metrics in Contact Center Reporting

Reaping the benefits of contact or call center reporting is impossible if you don’t understand its key metrics or KPIs (key performance indicators). These metrics offer super valuable insights into cost-effectiveness, contact center or call center agent performance, and customer experience to those who understand and decode them well.

Here are the three major metrics that you must understand well –

1. Performance metrics 

Contact or call center agent performance metrics refer to the indicators that tell you about your agent’s efficiency in managing regular customer calls. It gives you insights into your agent’s speed and precision in responding to and handling queries.

Based on the collected information, you can coach your agents and improve your overall strategy. Agents can then meet and surpass your customer interaction and service standards.

• Average handle time (AHT)

Contact centers use average handle time to measure the average duration of agent-customer interactions. It is calculated from the moment the customer calls and ends when the query is finally resolved.  AHT includes actual talk time, transfer times, hold times, and after-call work (time agents spend to analyze or follow up on the query).

• AHT formula

Average handle time = Total of (talk time + hold time + after-call work time) / Total calls (in number)

Low AHT is the aim as it indicates that agents are resolving issues instantly, streamlining customer service. When queries are resolved promptly, customer satisfaction will rise, and call center costs will go down due to less number of calls.

Note: Balance AHT with quality of service to ensure that instant query resolution doesn’t leave customers unsatisfied or compromise interaction effectiveness. 

• First contact resolution (FCR)

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First call resolution enables you to evaluate an agent’s ability to solve customer issues in one interaction. It shows you the percentage of queries an agent can settle in the first ever contact with a customer with zero transfers, pauses, or escalations.

This is crucial for customer happiness, as 70% of customers get annoyed when their calls are transferred between departments.

• FCR formula

First call resolution = Total number of calls settled in the first interaction/ total number of inbound calls

Monitoring your FCR can help you improve customer satisfaction, reduce customer effort, and lower frustration. Hence, you should always aim to keep your FCR high.

• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

CSAT score indicates customer satisfaction level after a customer interacts with your customer service agent. You need to extract your CSAT score from CSAT surveys. These surveys intentionally include open-ended questions to accurately store detailed customer feedback and a relevant score based on the feedback.

To calculate your CSAT score, request your customers to rate your customer service out of 5 or 10. Then, apply the formula.

• CSAT formula: 

CSAT score = (Total number of satisfied customers / Total number of survey responses) X 100

You must calculate your CSAT score consistently to better gauge whether your agents’ performance aligns with customer expectations. If not, start training or coaching them immediately. Remember, a high CSAT is an indication of happy customers. So, don’t forget to pat your back if it’s high.

2. Operations metrics 

Contact or call center operations metrics enable you to gauge how effectively your operations are flowing. It directly lets you dive into your call center’s operational performance over time. Monitoring operations metrics is important to identify trends, peak times, and staffing needs.  These metrics also help you get an overview of the effect of your company’s past initiatives on call volumes. The best examples of company initiatives are marketing campaigns and product launches.

• Call abandonment rate

Call abandonment rate refers to the percentage of incoming calls that customers terminate or leave before even connecting with an agent.  The reasons behind this termination may be complex IVR (interactive voice response) menus, unsatisfactory call routing systems, long hold times (44% of people get annoyed when the hold time is nearly 5 to 15 minutes), or inadequate staffing.

• CAR Formula: Call abandonment rate = (Total number of Calls – Total number of handled calls) / Total number of calls X 100

Monitoring it is important because a high abandonment rate indicates your call center agents are insufficient to handle the inbound call volumes. In such cases, you can timely optimize your staffing levels or include a callback option in the menu. This option enables customers to request a call back which eliminates draining time waiting on hold.

Bonus: Discover how to reduce abandoned calls.

• Queue time

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Call center queue time is the duration a customer waits in the call queue until agents answer. During this wait time, customers are on hold and can only interact with the agent when their chance comes. Remember to keep the queue time short to deliver a better customer experience and raise customer satisfaction.

• QT Formula: Queue time = Sum of total wait time over all the calls/ Total number of calls answered

Monitoring queue time is important because else you’ll never know when customers are going past their waiting capacity. Long wait times invite more call abandonment and customer loss. Tracking it consistently will ensure it is short and customers are satisfied.

• Service level agreement (SLA) compliance

This compliance metric evaluates your contact center’s efficiency based on call responsiveness. It is the rate of answered calls in a particular timeframe.

Your SLA might look like –

1. Answering 80% of calls within 20 seconds (thumb rule for most organizations)
2. Answering 80% of chats within 20 seconds
3. Answering 100% of emails within 8 hours

• SLA formula: Service level = (Total number of calls responded to within a pre-set timeframe/Total number of inbound calls) X 100 

It is essential to monitor and maintain a high service level to ensure satisfactory and prompt customer service delivery. When you regularly track service levels, managing staffing, call volumes, and resource allocation such that they meet customer expectations becomes easier.

3. Financial metrics 

Financial metrics in contact center reporting measure your contact center’s financial performance and efficiency. These metrics often include cost per call and revenue per call. Monitoring your financial metrics is an indispensable part of reporting because it helps you evaluate your profitability, optimize resource allocation, and improve revenue.

With these metrics, you can identify areas that have scope to reduce costs to improve the overall financial position of your contact center.

• Cost per call

Cost per call refers to the amount you are required to pay for each call. In other words, it is the average cost of every call your agent handles. Mostly, longer calls cost more but in some cases, longer calls save cost as the customer issue wouldn’t need another call.

Avoid this with proven contact center software, as it charges you a fixed price for unlimited calls. To improve your cost-per-call rate, you must improve training, use cloud-based CRM, and monitor performance metrics.

• CPC Formula: Cost per call = Total cost of all calls/ Total number of calls

Closely monitoring the cost per call is important because it gives you details on how cost-effective your call center operations are. It also helps you understand the issues in resource allocation so you can adjust them for lower cost per call.

• Revenue per call

This metric refers to the average revenue a company earns from a particular customer interaction over calls (inbound or outbound). It is also coined as revenue per successful call, wherein all the dropped or abandoned calls are eliminated.

As a part of revenue per call, you’ll find whether or not agents are achieving their sales targets.

• RPC Formula: Revenue per call for a particular period or agent = Total revenue contact center generates in a timeframe/ total number of handled calls

Calculating revenue per call is non-negotiable because it makes you aware of your revenue-generating, popular products. You can either brush up on those for more revenue or launch similar products.

Note: To improve revenue per call, start delivering a great customer experience. As a result, you’ll also get a better customer retention rate, ultimately increasing future sales.

Suggested Read: : Call Center Reporting Tools: A Comprehensive Guide

Introduction to Contact Center Analytics 

Contact center analytics offers useful insights into your customer interactions over chat, social media, calls, and SMS. With contact center analytics, you also get information regarding customer preferences and behavior. This data informs your decisions and enhances operational efficiency.

But how do you get contact center analytics of your contact center? Through contact center analytics solution.  Here are some reasons why contact centers use contact center analytics solutions –

• View agent performance across all contact center channels from a single place. It allows you to monitor all the key performance metrics for a better overview of operations and customer interactions.
• Analyze purchase history and customer interactions to better identify crosseling and upselling opportunities. Agents can also tailor their services to align with customer demands.
• Detect and resolve customer issues in real time before it’s too late and starts affecting brand image and health.
• Identify areas where agents are incompetent and provide them with personalized training and feedback. This will ultimately improve your support quality.

Types of Analytics

Contact center analytics come in different types with their unique purposes and contributions to the business. Let’s dive into the three major analytics types –

1. Descriptive analytics 

This analytics understands past trends and events by examining historical data. It offers information regarding call center operations by closely monitoring what happened over a period of time. The major metrics it analyzes are average handle time, call volumes, customer satisfaction scores, and first-call resolution rates.

Based on this analysis, you can quickly identify improvement areas, patterns, and trends. Moving forward, this knowledge will inform your decisions.

For instance, suppose your descriptive analytics shows that call volumes are high during a particular day or week. You can then adjust staffing levels and resources to reduce wait times and ensure optimal service.

2. Predictive analytics

Next comes predictive analytics, which analyzes historical data like service requests, call volumes, and customer feedback to predict future trends. The simplest example of a future pattern is higher support needs during product launches.

But how does this analytics work? Basically, predictive analytics applies statistical algorithms to forecast call center patterns. This helps you optimize operations and prepare for future demands well. When you are aware of future patterns, you are more prepared for customer interactions. This reduces AHT.

Here are some core uses of predictive analytics in call centers –

• Anticipate the most important holidays for your customers to craft targeted messaging.
• Evaluate customers’ maximum response time and their preferred channel to optimize your services across all channels.
• Forecast high call volume times to be prepared with extra staff in advance.

3. Prescriptive analytics

This analytics is interrelated with predictive analytics. Prescriptive analytics utilizes ML, AI, and predictive models to suggest the best potential actions you must take to gain results. With these analytics, you can gauge the probability and profitability of varying call center outcomes. You can then better understand the risks involved in those outcomes and plan accordingly.

Here are some major reasons why prescriptive analytics is important in call centers –

• Determines the best action to fulfill customer demands.
• Identifies the best way to improve agent performance. It’ll tell you the best way to improve agents—training, new scripts, limiting them to specific customers, or skill development.
• Suggests ways to optimize your contact center results after factoring in all business KPIs like customer satisfaction and profitability.

Recommended Read: : Call Center Monitoring: Best Practices & 6 Providers

How to Create a Benchmarking Report for Your Contact Center?

Contact center benchmarking reports refer to those business reports that enable you to look at your company, performance, or product in comparison with other similar companies or products. With this comparison, you can easily identify opportunity areas in your industry or business. Let’s see how to create one –

1. Enlist important KPI and analytics 

The foremost step to creating benchmarking reports is defining relevant KPIs and analytics that align with your contact center’s objectives. While defining this, consider your sales and product lifecycle and the competitor product you want your report against.

For instance, if customer satisfaction is your priority, your KPI must include the First Call Resolution rate(FCR), Average Handle Times, and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).

2. Set clear and achievable metrics goals

When creating benchmarking reports, it’s important to set realistic metrics standards and performance targets. Not doing so can demotivate agents for not being able to achieve goals even after making consistent efforts. Here it is also important to ensure that your set goals are not competing or conflicting with each other.

For instance, don’t try to improve FCR while lowering the average handle time, as this would confuse your agents and lead to no results.

3. Know and adapt to industry benchmarks 

When you’re enlisting KPIs, try to keep them in line with business value, real-world expectations, and customer journey maps of your products. Above all, align with industry benchmarks. Why? Because this helps you set accurate goals for your team and ensure that your company doesn’t lag behind competitors.

Suppose the industry standard of FCR is around 70-79%. Now, if your FCR goes below this rate, you’ll spoil your customer’s experience and satisfaction.

4. Start using a contact center reporting software

With this software, you can easily digest data, analyze metrics, and track KPIs. It also offers real-time dashboards for you to track key metrics in real-time and immediately generate custom benchmarking reports containing your desired KPIs.

5. Consider your agents’ suggestions

Include agents’ inputs on workflows and customer interactions to make your benchmarking reports more real and transparent. Also, when agents contribute, they’ll automatically try to perform better and surpass the industry benchmarks.

Top 5 Contact Center Reporting Solutions

With a plethora of contact center reporting solutions floating in the market, it is difficult to choose and adopt one. That’s why we have listed the top 5 contact center reporting tools with features, pros, cons, and pricing for a better and more informed software choice.

1. Nextiva 

Nextiva is a leading contact center reporting solution that offers omnichannel customer experience insights on top of standard call center data. It auto-pulls data from emails, SMS, calls, web chats, and social media to arrange and present it in dashboards and reports.

Features

• Post-call surveys
• Call monitoring
• Escalation management
• Real-time analytics

Pricing 

Essential: $18.95/user/month

Professional: $22.95/user/month

Enterprise: $32.95/user/month

2. Zendesk

Zendesk is a cloud-based contact center reporting software that offers omnichannel analytics and reporting capability. It brings all data from different channels together for you to evaluate customer interactions with your brand without missing important details.

Features

• Agent workspace
• Historical reporting
• Channel based dashboard
• AI-powered automation

Pricing

Team: $55/user/month

Growth: $89/user/month

Professional: $115/user/month

Enterprise: Contact sales

3. CloudTalk

CloudTalk is a cloud call center software that brings call data together and allows users to evaluate agent performance and call statistics. How? With its real-time analytics and dashboards.

Features

• Real-time dashboard
• Agent reporting
• Wallboard
• Group reporting

Pricing 

Starter: €25/user/month

Essential: €30/user/month

Expert: €50/user/month

Custom: Contact sales 

4. Aircall

Aircall is an amazing, simple, and easy-to-use contact center solution that offers a range of reporting features. Its pre-built dashboards and reports are extremely useful, concise, and crystal clear. It is best suited for small to medium businesses that require simple reporting.

Features

• Activity feed
• Call tagging
• CRM integrations
• Insight cards

Pricing 

Essential: $30/license

Professional: $50/license

Custom: Contact sales

5. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is another powerful and user-friendly contact center reporting solution. Its reporting enables you to identify your helpdesk-related issues and track key metrics. Using this solution, you can easily measure and improve efficiency.

Features

• Time metrics
• Ticket volume trends
• Agent performance report
• Customer satisfaction surrey

Pricing

Growth: $15/user/month

Pro: $49/user/month

Enterprise: $79/user/month

Wrapping Up

We hope you have gained a deeper insight into effective contact center reporting and analytics after going through this informative guide. Creating a powerful report can help you enhance customer service, improve agent performance, and enhance resource planning.

Remember that a contact center report is incomplete without key metrics like performance, financial, and operations metrics. Coming to the analytics part, we hope you understand what it is and why contact centers use analytics.

However, catering to your contact center’s reporting manually can be a hassle. You can easily avoid this using contact center reporting solutions. We have listed the top 5 solutions for you to rely on. So, explore and adopt one today!

Don't Miss to Read: : Contact Center vs Call Center: 10 Key Differences and Why it Matters

FAQs

1) What is the difference between contact center reporting and analytics?

Contact center reporting organizes your raw data, while analytics includes insights for accurate decision-making.

2) How can benchmarking improve my contact center’s performance?

Benchmarking helps you gauge the inefficiencies of your contact center in comparison to your competitors. This can help you prioritize underperforming areas.

3) What are the key features to look for in a contact center reporting solution?

Some of the key features of contact center reporting solutions are third-party integrations, dashboards, and AI-powered automation.

4) How can AI and machine learning enhance contact center reporting?

AI and ML in contact center reporting are predictive analytics and real-time insights that help you make more accurate decisions proactively.

Updated : September 17, 2024

Akarsh Jain

Akarsh is a B2B & SaaS content writer having experience in the industry. His expertise lies in creating targeted content for Telephony, VoIP, and CRM domains. His proficiency also includes fine-tuning content, guaranteeing enhanced visibility and engagement. Akarsh is committed to remaining at the forefront of emerging SaaS trends to ensure the creation of relevant and relatable content that adds value.

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