Hosted Call Center Featured Article

Third-Party Reporting Highly Effective With Call Center Wallboards

By Susan J. Campbell
TMCnet Contributing Editor

Integrating third-party reporting into call center wallboards is considered an easy and necessary task. This can enhance the ACD reporting capabilities for the contact center and add a solution for the customized integration of information on summary reports.

As captured in this Spectrum (News - Alert) Corporation report, raw information off of the ACD is captured through and integrated with a variety of metrics and application data. Companies also rely on this data in robust CRM (customer relationship management) and WFM (workforce management) platforms.

There are some limitations in the ACD that could prevent customers from viewing information in a required format. Limitations like these lead to the adoption of third-party reporting. Spectrum reporting works by enhancing call center wallboards as raw information is captured and staged within a isolated SQL database.

There are clear advantages to using third-party reporting in call center wallboards. The provider must first establish customized KPIs (key performance indicators) and Metrics that the ACD is unable to accomplish, and then collect information from sources outside the standard ACD, WFM or even CRM. This third-party call center reporting alleviates the burden on the ACD while information is being put onto other various devices.

For businesses that range in size, the ACD is able to handle both small and extremely large volumes of information that it then consolidates and works into an integrated report in real time. The resulting report tends to be a standard representation of the data, however, and not necessarily customized according to what the specific contact center needs.

Once the ACD captures that raw information and stages it inside isolated SQL database, Spectrum is able to construct a unique approach to reporting that meets the needs within the contact centers, overcoming this challenge. As contact centers do things differently in terms of calculating their metrics and KPI’s, using a third-party reporting agency like Spectrum could offer a solution to address the challenges associated with handling their occupancy, time and service levels.

Communications within a contact center is seldom restricted by the ACD. Multiple levels of employees need to be able to review the summarized reports. A third-party agency can support more functionality than the ACD alone. Nearly 80 percent of customers with Spectrum have information with other sources combined, summarized and integrated with their ACD data. But contracting with Spectrum for reporting services is time saving and proving to be cost effective.

By using an outside source, call center customers are able to migrate throughout from one ACD platform to any other without risking a loss in their reporting. Third-party reporting also gives its users the capability of migrating between two ACD vendors while leveraging call center wallboards. When transitioning from one center that has two ACDs, information can still been viewed as a total summary to ensure the center has the ability to report the necessary information at any given time.