Insights

How reporting improves process refinement in the globally distributed contact center

Author: Matthew Wolf

We’ve recently been exploring the importance of access to clean, quality data in your globally distributed contact center. Real-time data insights drive better business decisions, increase productivity, and elevate service quality and customer satisfaction rates. Data access and aggregation can help you optimize your workforce, inform contingency planning. And in our most recent article, we learned how metrics can improve issue identification and resolution.

In this article, I’ll share why access to quality data is essential to reporting and process refinement.

Metrics grounded in reality

Metrics help organizations proactively improve performance when aligned with business decisions and business needs. Metrics based on historical data and grounded in reality help inform thresholds that trigger alerts upon detection of potential issues. In fact, the most meaningful thresholds are dynamic, accounting for a variety of circumstances and not just the worst-case scenario.

Here’s what I mean: let’s say your target wait time is less than two minutes, and you’ve set your threshold based on this number. On a slow day, you’ll likely meet your target, and no alerts will be triggered. However, you may not realize that despite lower call volumes, actual wait times still exceed 90 seconds— longer than they should be given current staffing levels. Without meaningful, dynamic thresholds, it’s easy to miss factors impeding performance and opportunities to enhance service levels.

Additionally, with the right reporting tools, you can use data to make business decisions at a higher level — not just tactical ones on the ground. In other words, instead of using data to put out the fire, you can use data to fireproof the house.

For example, perhaps you’re not hitting wait time targets. Without data insights and detailed reporting, you might assume that you have a staffing issue, so you bring 30 more agents online. But with robust reporting capabilities, you can dig into the data and surface trends and determine if you truly have call volume spikes or if something else has gone amiss, such as a system that gets taken offline for regular maintenance at an inopportune time — something easily remedied through a process change.

A data-driven approach to process refinement

Robust reporting can be beneficial for ongoing process refinement. It can help you assess process effectiveness and identify upstream or downstream changes that impact process efficiency. For instance, you might have a process that’s been in place for years. Only through reporting might you see that upstream changes, such as the introduction of chat support, have rendered this process inefficient or obsolete.  

The ability to report on issues experienced over a period of time and the actions taken to resolve those issues can provide insight into recurring patterns and potential process shortcomings. Without adequate historical reporting, you may not realize that the same issue keeps popping up—and that your existing process is addressing a symptom rather than a deeper cause.

With high-value reporting, you can make better business decisions and ensure your processes evolve to meet those business needs.

A more intelligent solution

Data aggregation, reporting, and process refinement across the globally distributed contact center comprise a few reasons we developed the Beyondsoft Intelligent Operations Platform (BIOPs). Part of our managed service offering, BIOPs provides a unified solution for multi-system monitoring, analytics, and workflow automation across disparate systems. It helps to reduce manual processes while allowing us to glean metrics and insights that inform decisions around staffing, issue detection, and resolution—all while reducing the need for human intervention and headcount. 

For a more holistic understanding of your organization’s strengths and weaknesses in this area, I highly recommend completing this free survey.