The Report as We Know it is Dying – and Thank Goodness

If you are still leaning heavily on reports for your day-to-day and month-to-month in your contact center, we need to talk.

Let’s play a game. Say you’re an army wizard, or whatever those army types are called these days. Which would you rather have: (a) early warning of an approaching missile, or (b) an extremely detailed report after the missile has destroyed your supersonic submarine tank?

If you answered (b), well, aren’t you just a smartypants. Here have a lolly.

The point is, the right piece of information, given at the right time, is worth more than a million spreadsheets. Because here’s the thing: reports are reactive – and in the contact center business, reactive is the losing end of The Quick and the Dead.

What we mean to say is, if you’re learning something for the first time only after you’ve fired up Excel, well look: you’re learning it too late.

Here on Starship Zailab, we like reports. Our omnichannel  contact center solution is full of the things. But we’d much rather tell you a call is going badly before it has gone badly. We’d much rather tell you your agents are transferring too many calls while you can still do something about it.

It is, frankly, shocking how much we sit and ponder these things. Here, for example, is an extract from a document detailing our campaign manager persona, which we’re referring to at every stage during the development of our campaign management service (work-in-progress, FYI).

The campaign manager is the interface between marketing, third party lead suppliers and the contact center. They are responsible for making sure that their campaigns are successful and that agents always have work. They need to feedback to marketing about the status of campaigns. They need to feedback to lead providers about the quality of their leads.

There are three main questions they ask every working day:

1. Are the campaigns succeeding or failing?
   1. Which campaigns are doing the best?
      1. Are these campaigns the highest-priority work items for agents?
   2. If the campaigns are failing:
      1. Is it because the quality of the leads is poor?
         1. Which campaigns have poor leads (high number of wrong-party contacts, invalid numbers, et cetera)?
      2. Is it because the leads just aren’t interested?
         1. What are the reasons a lead is rejecting the pitch?
      3. Is it because the agents are burning leads?
         1. Which agents close leads without dialing, or with very short ring times?
         2. Are agents attempting all the contact numbers for a given lead?
2. At which pace are the agents getting through their leads?
   1. If they’re going too quickly, then new leads need to be loaded.
   2. If they’re not going quickly enough, the reasons for this must be investigated.

To be honest, we’re dreaming real big here. By the time we’ve got AI crunching away at the data, we’re going to be able to tell you things you’d never have dreamed were possible to infer. It’ll be like having a major-league team of Harvard analysts working with lakes full of high-quality data – and all for the sort of money you might pay a team of juniors.

We like to think that’d be just great.

Read more about using Zailab’s contact center reporting in your business here.