For the call center, the ultimate goal is service. Provide your agents with an easier way to visualize the queues and metrics behind customer interactions, and they’ll have what they need to pursue operational goals.  Call center wallboards provide bright, highly visible tool to impart this knowledge on your agents in real-time, and because they’re relatively inexpensive they offer an easy way to target to improve your staffs performance.

But while incorporating wallboards into your overall strategy is an easy way to help your staff, it’s important to remember that the hardware alone is not sufficient in keeping agents up to speed. To support your wallboard you need to have proper reporting options in place and at the ready to pipe mission critical data to agents.

Choosing which metrics you’re tracking is the first step to implementing this strategy, but keep in mind there should be a ceiling on what you include. Inundating your agents with information can be counterproductive to the overall success of the platform. Calls in queue, abandonment rate and call time averages are all well and good, but there are arguably better ways to transmit this data to your team.

As Susan Saldibar of U.K.-based Call Center Helper points out, “Thresholds should be created that cause the metrics to change colors as performance is impacted.  You should always create an upper and lower threshold, so that you can reward positive goal-reaching behavior and adjust poor performance quickly.  Don’t ignore differences in call volumes for different times of the day and days of the week. Take the time up front to set intelligent thresholds and you will be rewarded by less data, but better data.”

Finding the data that will be of most use to your staff is of course a matter of continued analysis and improvement, and metrics that may work well for one type of operation could be totally inappropriate for another. Actionable intelligence is the goal of all call reporting strategies and when you use them in conjunction with call center wallboards you open a new channel of communication for your staff.

Chris DiMarco is a Managing Editor for TMCnet. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert) Chris worked with e-commerce provider Suresource as a contact center representative and development analyst. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page. Follow him on Twitter (News - Alert) @cpdimarco.

Edited by Juliana Kenny