UC Reporting and Analysis Tools Shouldn't be 'One Size Fits All'
November 23, 2015
By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor
One of the many benefits companies that switch to unified communications (UC) solutions today have gained is more transparency into how their telecom resources are used. Call accounting, often a side or extra feature of a UC solution, can help spot misuse of resources such as long-distance calling or mobile devices. It can uncover patterns of inefficiencies such as calls being routed to one toll-free or customer support number while other numbers are under-utilized. It can help companies understand where they can safely eliminate spending without affecting operations or customer support quality. It can also determine the telecom usage patterns of the most effective employees, or help companies understand where they need to add resources. Call accounting, however, is only as good as the reporting function that supports it.
A good reporting and analysis solution can broaden the benefits of a UC solution by serving as a centralized repository of call activity from virtually any VoIP or legacy PBX (News - Alert) platform on the enterprise voice network. These solutions can handle collection, normalization, secure storage, and reporting to meet a variety of corporate telecom usage management needs including traffic analysis, network planning, employee productivity, device utilization, historic call archive, chargeback, abuse and misuse detection, and even contact center metrics. The latter capability can help contact centers achieve better efficiency and smooth out traffic to avoid unexpected volume spikes.
Solutions such as Infortel Select, ISI Telemanagement Inc.’s Unified Communications reporting and analysis tool, can provide deep insight into contact center operations that can benefits both employees and customers – as well as the company’s bottom line -- in a multitude of ways. Infortel Select UCCX Reporting is an option that can be added to an Infortel Select UC reporting solution to enable collection and processing of contact center metrics from Cisco’s (News - Alert) Unified Contact Center Express application to gain improved visibility into queue and agent-level information that is not available from call detail and call management records produced by the Cisco UCM cluster. It can collect from any number of data sources and allows reporting users to select which data sources, queues and agents to include or exclude from any report produced. It also allows users to define retention time for collected contact center metrics, creating a historic database of key queue and agent stats that may be useful to the contact center in resource planning or scheduling in the future.
Different contact centers have different needs, and one-size-fits-all reporting solutions will seldom provide every organization with the insight it needs to improve operations. An ideal solution should provide an extensive list of convenient and automated reporting features and allow users to pick from any number of data sources to build the picture they need to make decisions about how manage the contact center. From here, the contact center should be able to offer different reports, varying levels of visibility into operations (depending on job title) and a variety of alters delivered via different channels so managers, supervisors, agents and even operations executives can gain precisely the picture they require to do their jobs properly.
Reporting will never be a one-size-fits-all function, since no two contact centers are alike. If your current solution expects you to follow a rigid pre-planned set of standardized reports, consider looking for a solution that allows you to determine what you need to see and when you need to see it.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi