Call Center Reporting Best Practices + 9 Ways to Do It Better

Reporting is key to understanding your contact center. It helps QA teams measure performance across their entire organization, showing what’s working (and what isn’t) so they can ensure customer satisfaction and efficiency. This is why following call center reporting best practices is essential.

Of course, it’s never as simple as it seems. The amount of data that flows through your average contact center is immense, to say the least—which means finding a way to manage and sift through it for relevant information can be a hassle. And in many cases, you’re pulling on a ton of disconnected threads from several different systems, meaning the data you do have isn’t always accurate or reliable.

All of this means that building reports (that are actually useful) involves sacrificing a huge chunk of time and resources.

In this blog post, we’ll explore what makes reporting so difficult, how you can establish some call center reporting best practices, and even give you a template for successful, informative, and actionable reports.

The 5 biggest challenges of call center reporting

Handling the volume of data

Data has become incredibly vital today, and call centers generate a massive amount of it, ranging from call logs and recordings to customer feedback. The sheer volume of raw data can be overwhelming, making it difficult to comb through and discover the valuable information inside.

Efficient data management systems are crucial to handling this, allowing you to focus on getting meaningful metrics, rather than getting lost in a sea of numbers and data.

Managing data from disparate systems

Integrating data from a ton of different, isolated systems is another hurdle that needs to be jumped to get the information needed. Call centers often use multiple platforms like telephony systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, workforce management tools, and quality assurance (QA) software.

Bringing this data together into a single cohesive reporting structure can be a challenge, which means that streamlining data through a single solution ensures you can get a full view of your operations.

Dealing with a lack of standardization

Inconsistent data formats and reporting standards across different systems can lead to inaccurate and misleading reports, leading to huge issues down the road, not just for reports but also for your QA systems.

Standardizing how your teams collect data and create reports is essential for ensuring consistency and accuracy. Establishing clear guidelines and utilizing software that enforces these standards can greatly enhance the accuracy of your reports.

Struggling to identify practical insights

With so much data flowing through your average call center, identifying actionable insights can feel like finding a needle in a haystack. It’s essential to focus on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your business goals to ensure that your organization is actually improving and striving for new heights instead of stagnating.

Advanced call center analytics can help by highlighting trends and patterns, enabling you to make informed decisions that drive improvement.

Building quality reports efficiently

Creating comprehensive (and readable) reports takes time to get the right mix—especially in a high-pressure environment like a contact center. The challenge lies in presenting your data in a way that’s easy to understand and shows actions to take to get the results you want.

Automating report generation with software can save your teams time and ensure those reports are accurate and insightful, giving you a solid foundation for data-driven decisions.

How do you prepare a report? 9 call center reporting best practices

Creating effective reporting within your contact center is crucial for driving performance, enhancing customer satisfaction, and ensuring that your call center is on the right path to success.

To help you streamline this process, we’ve got a list of nine contact center reporting best practices to create comprehensive, actionable, and informative reports.

• Set goals and pick the right metrics: Define clear objectives for your reports. What are you aiming to achieve? Whether improving customer satisfaction or reducing first call resolution times, choose call center metrics that align with your goals using the SMART method. After establishing them, ensure you’re consistently checking your progress, too.
• Ensure your data is accurate and reliable: Accurate data is the most important part of creating reports, which means you need to make sure the data you use is correct and reliable. Implement QA processes to validate the accuracy of your data sources and generate reports. Reliable data leads to trustworthy insights, enabling you to confidently make decisions.
• Make the data accessible: You need to be able to access the right data to create these reports, so make sure you have it. Ensuring all relevant stakeholders can easily access the data they need leads to better reporting. Use cloud-based solutions or centralized storage (like your QA platform) to have a single source of truth for your teams to draw from.
• Customize your reports: One-size-fits-all reports rarely meet the diverse needs of different stakeholders. Tailor your reports to cater to the specific asks of different stakeholders, departments, and use cases to ensure everyone gets information in a digestible way. Customized reports help ensure that your recipients will actually read them and help keep them engaged (and may lead to follow-ups instead of sitting dormant in an inbox).
• Use visuals and tell a story: Data visualization transforms boring, unreadable data into something compelling and easy to understand. Use charts, graphs, dashboards, and infographics to present your data. Pairing visuals with a narrative helps drive a point across and makes the report more engaging and actionable in the process.
• Focus on actionable insights: The point of reporting is to find useful ways you can make real-world impacts. Highlight trends, anomalies, and key details that need to be pointed out to make the most out of your reports. Clear, actionable insights enable your team to make the necessary changes.
• Track the impact on KPIs: Regularly track how your actions affect your call center, including your most important KPIs. Monitoring these metrics over time, how they change, and the actions taken to impact them helps you measure the effectiveness of your strategies and make the necessary adjustments to continuously improve them.
• Take advantage of AI and automation: Automation (and the addition of new AI tools) can dramatically speed up your reporting processes. Automated data collection and analysis can reduce the manual effort needed, improve accuracy, and speed up your entire reporting process. Plus, automation can make your reports more consistent and comprehensive than pure human effort.
• Incorporate customer feedback: Customer feedback is a goldmine of insights, and you can collect it from nearly all channels (through surveys, reviews, calls, emails, social media, and more). Including this feedback in your reports gives you insight into your call center’s performance from a new angle and helps you understand how your customers view your services.

Call center reporting template guidelines

Creating a structured and comprehensive call center report is essential for monitoring performance, identifying areas for improvement, and driving strategic decisions. We’ve cooked up a basic template that QA managers can use as a starting point for building reports, ensuring they’re informative and actionable.

Your typical call center report should include:

• An executive summary. Start with a brief overview that highlights the most critical findings and insights from the report. This section should provide a snapshot of overall performance and key trends, setting the stage for the more detailed analysis that follows.
• An overview of key metrics. Include a section that shows the most important metrics at a glance. This should show your actual performance compared to your targets and should include the most relevant data for this report.
• A breakdown of different areas (with analysis). After you’ve covered the information at a glance, drill down into the specific areas you’re reporting on. This could include:
  • Customer satisfaction: Focusing on CSAT scores or other customer-focused metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), first call resolution (FCR) rate, and call abandonment rates helps tell a story about how your findings impact your customers.
  • Operational efficiency: Examine metrics like average handle time (AHT), FCR, and call volume to illustrate how smoothly your call center is functioning.
  • Agent performance: Evaluate individual and team performance metrics like QA scores, script adherence, and call resolution to show how your agents are performing across the board.
• An action plan. End your report with a clear action plan that outlines specific steps to improve or maintain performance. This plan should be actionable and time-bound, with any specific goals created using the SMART method. This ensures that every recommendation is practical and poised to provide measurable improvements.

By following this template guideline, you can create a call center report that provides a comprehensive overview of your operations and guides your team towards continuous improvement. These tips help make your reporting as accurate, relevant, and digestible as possible, ensuring that stakeholders understand the message you’re trying to convey and how to reach your desired results.

How to choose the right call center reporting tools

In addition to following call center reporting best practices, selecting the right tools is critical if you want to improve the performance and efficiency of your contact center. Most QA platforms will include some level of reporting functionality, but some tools can be more advanced than others.

When evaluating call center reporting tools, there are a handful of features that you should prioritize to ensure you can get the most out of your reports.

Detailed call recordings and logs are essential for monitoring customer interactions, assessing agent performance, and identifying areas for improvement.

In-depth productivity reports help track metrics like AHT, call volume, and agent activity, helping teams gauge operational efficiency.

Additionally, advanced analytics and reporting tools like speech and text analysis, AI-powered tools, and sentiment analysis can add new insights to your data and help you stay ahead of potential issues.

Beyond these features, there are several other factors that are crucial when you’re trying to establish contact center reporting best practices.

Accessibility and integration are key, so your tools should be easy to use and should fit into your tech stack without any issues. Complex, difficult tools can lead to less adoption with your teams and impact your QA team’s productivity. Plus, seamless integration means your tool can access all the data it needs to create compelling–and accurate–reports.

Scalability is also something to consider, especially as your contact center grows. Your reporting tools will need to grow with you, so ensure they can meet your current (and future) needs.

Finally, you should consider how sophisticated a tool you need. Will a more advanced, comprehensive tool help you get better insights into your business? Or do you simply need more basic features to round out your already existing internal reporting systems?

What’s the difference between call center reporting and business intelligence (BI)?

While call center reporting and business intelligence have a lot of overlap, they’re distinct areas with their own unique roles. Reporting forms the foundation by providing accurate and reliable data across various metrics (like call volume, AHT, CSAT, FCR, and more). These reports offer a snapshot of your contact center’s performance, enabling you to monitor operations and identify immediate issues.

Business intelligence, on the other hand, takes this data to another level by interpreting and analyzing it to find minute changes and trends. BI tools delve deeper into the data than your typical reporting software, offering insights that go far beyond the surface. This analysis helps you identify patterns, forecast future trends, and make strategic decisions to improve the overall performance of your contact center—and your business.

Within the context of call center quality assurance, both of these make up a vital part of your operations. Reporting ensures you have a solid base of accurate data to work with, while BI provides the analytical capabilities needed to interpret this data and turn it into actionable insights.

Together, they enable you to maintain high-quality service, boost operational efficiency, and drive continuous improvement within your call center. Combining the strong basis of reporting and the in-depth analysis from BI helps you create concrete contact center best practices.

Put your data to work with call center reporting

Regardless of their size, contact centers generate massive amounts of data—so why don’t you use it?

Establishing call center reporting best practices is essential if you want to deliver top-tier customer service and improve efficiency. And the impact of detailed, effective reporting is even bigger than that, as it helps you spot areas to improve and ways to deliver better service both quickly and reliably.

If you’re looking to get the most out of your call center—and the data it collects—you should be using the best tools available. Scorebuddy offers an easy-to-use QA platform with detailed reports, automation, and business intelligence all in one package. Are you ready to turn your complex QA data into actionable, tangible results? Sign up for a demo today and get ahead of the competition.