This blog post was co-authored by Genesys technology partner, eMite.

Contact centers are under constant pressures. Managers must meet the demands of their C-suite, agents and customers. And, as the world becomes increasingly virtual and contact centers become entirely remote, the demand to create better customer experiences is increasingly important. Dissatisfied customers can lead to a decrease in revenue, while undertrained or overwhelmed agents can negatively affect performance or create an unstable workforce.

According to a recent survey of Genesys customers, more than 55% say that reporting and analytics are the most significant challenges that contact center managers face. Overcoming this obstacle means streamlining reporting processes, eliminating data silos and creating a solution that can handle a complex reporting environment.

Why is that so important — and why are reporting and analytics still so challenging?

Below are five reporting challenges contact center managers face, with tips on how to resolve these challenges and advice on how to leverage better reporting to create a world-class contact center experience for your customers.

1. Making Reporting Simple and Efficient

Managing multiple data sources and getting a holistic understanding of how your contact center is performing — historically and in real time — are the biggest challenges in reporting. This is especially true if you have a large, complex contact center ecosystem.

Having to log into multiple reporting tools is time-consuming. And it creates inefficient data silos. Additionally, it’s a nearly impossible task to make sense of, organize and present data to the C-suite in a way that tells the full story of your contact center’s performance.

Adding a reporting and analytics tool that can integrate data from multiple sources, lets contact center managers eliminate the need to use multiple tools like Salesforce, Zendesk, Google Sheets, Excel or CSVs when creating a complete contact center performance report. Creating a clear, single view of your data sources on a dashboard or wallboard lets managers quickly and easily analyze agent performance, current support, ticket status and other critical KPIs to paint a better picture of overall performance. This immediate access to actionable data provides the type of real-time insights that allow you to make informed decisions faster.

Integrating multiple data sources offers visibility into where you can improve, areas where you excel and, ultimately, how to optimize and help agents create the best experience possible for the customer on the other end of the call.

2. Put All of Your Data in One Report

Getting the data into a single dashboard isn’t always enough to satisfy the C-suite, executives or stakeholders who want to know how the contact center is performing. They want to know exactly how performance affects revenue, how calls are influencing the company’s Net Promotor Score (NPS) and what can be done to optimize agent performance. They also want the data to correlate to specific business KPIs. This all can be overwhelming for the contact center manager.

Reports should meet the needs of your organization, be easily available and quick to deploy. However, this can be challenging with reporting platforms like Salesforce that hold important sales and revenue data in tandem with support system data (ITSM).

Having access to out-of-the-box, customizable reports is critical. But it’s even more important to be able to easily create customized dashboards and reports that match the KPIs the C-suite cares about — with the ability to create the custom reports without an IT bottleneck.

The goal is to make it simple. Don’t try to Frankenstein together a Salesforce ITSM report, a Salesforce sales/revenue report, and a Zendesk report with custom CSV — all to get a holistic view of your contact center performance. Instead, invest in an end-to-end reporting and analytics solution that not only integrates all this rich data into one place, but also filters out the noise and only reports on the KPIs you need — in one easily digestible view.

3. Real-Time, Actionable Data

Do you know how your contact center is performing right now? Being able to look at a single source of truth for contact center performance is invaluable to contact center managers.

Imagine a scenario where you, as a contact center manager at a major insurance provider, are asked by your executive team for an immediate report of how the contact center is performing. There’s been a natural disaster and calls are anticipated to skyrocket. Your company needs accurate and real-time data so calls can be reallocated, messaging can be communicated effectively and agents can provide the highest level of support possible to customers. Panic would probably set in if you didn’t have a solid reporting solution already in place.

Real-time reporting capabilities, combined with historical reporting, will future-proof your contact center and prepare you for any event that affects it.

Understanding how the contact center performs in real time is invaluable to a manager who needs to optimize agent performance, reallocate resources and make decisions that increase productivity and efficiency. And it’ll improve the customer experience. With a real-time dashboard or wallboard designed to show your most important KPIs in real time, contact center managers can do their jobs effectively — in the moments when your contact center needs to be performing at its best.

When combined with a historical look at performance data, a reliable report can make the difference between demonstrating success or failure to show how which decisions helped the contact center.

4. Custom KPIs

As customer expectations continue to rise, it’s increasingly difficult for the contact center to meet their demands, especially with the growth in available service channels. This makes it more important than ever to know what delights your customers — and how your employees can achieve it. But to gauge customer satisfaction, it’s important to look beyond traditional KPIs. Consider the following questions:

    • How are your agents performing?
    • What is your average response time?
    • How many calls are being handled?
    • What are ticket statuses?

Each metric tells a story about contact center performance, customer satisfaction and the bigger picture. It can mean the difference between dollars in and dollars out. The challenge is not only identifying those unique KPIs and reporting on them, but also creating that level of reporting without the knowledge of custom coding or pulling in IT support to create the custom reports or add/amend them, as needed.

To do this, you need a tool that allows you to create custom KPIs, easily and efficiently adjust KPIs and dashboards as your business goals change, and easily run custom KPI reports. In isolation, individual KPIs won’t give you all the information you need to understand where to make improvements as well as what steps to take in creating the type of customer experience that will set your company apart from your competitors. Connecting the dots between all your most important KPIs is crucial to supporting the growth and continuous improvement of your contact center.

One thing we learned by working with contact centers across the globe is that there isn’t a universal set of KPIs. Each contact center has performance data that’s uniquely important to them — whether that’s influenced by the type of industry they’re in, their geographic location, their product or service, or even a unique challenge they face. Just think about the chaos of managing a retail contact center during the holiday shopping season or a critical services provider during a natural disaster. In the end, if you can’t report on the data that makes an impact to your business, your reporting tool could be hurting your bottom line.

5. Omnichannel Views and Reporting

Contact centers operate across multiple channels to communicate with customers. And that number of channels is only increasing as contact center technology expands to adjust to market and customer needs.

Omnichannel experiences effortlessly unify inbound and outbound communication to deliver proactive, contextual interactions to your customers. Create seamless, personalized engagements across all channels throughout the entire customer journey.

To meet these demands, look for a reporting solution that integrates data from the different channels your organization uses into a single view. Companies that can deliver a seamless omnichannel customer experience across multiple channels and touchpoints to develop a significant competitive advantage, reduce customer churn and increase profits. But without a tool that helps you report and analyze those channels, there’s no way to effectively measure, optimize and make business decisions to create an omnichannel experience.

The phrase “single view” is especially important; the contact center industry needs a solution that shows all data in a single pane of glass. With so much tech, so many tools and so many channels, reporting and analytics has become the biggest pain point of all business units across all industries. It’s time consuming and difficult — and it’s nearly impossible to keep up with updates, migrations and tech stack add-ons that companies are adopting to keep pace with customer needs.

Bringing It All Together

Creating a world-class contact center in an increasingly complex, remote and omnichannel environment is difficult enough. Adding on the ability to report on your contact center performance effectively and efficiently has become infinitely more difficult.

To improve contact center reporting performance, choose a reporting and analytics platform that integrates seamlessly with your current tech stack and contact center platform. Doing so will prevent future reporting headaches and migration issues — and it’ll make certain you get to ROI as fast as possible.

For Genesys customers, eMite can solve all these reporting challenges and create a reliable reporting solution as you migrate contact center platforms, move to the cloud or add on data sources or tech.

Join us and eMite in a live webinar on Thursday, December 17 @ 8am PT and discover “How to keep up with complex and evolving reporting requirements“.

For more information, visit eMite in the AppFoundry Marketplace.