Desktop Call centre Manager application flash demo

Background

Call Centre managers Live and breathe their reports. Every week, every month, hours are spent disseminating tell tale information from them. Any one Report provides indicators about the System, Agent and Queue efficiencies.

If the system isn't optimal agents may have to keep callers waiting while information is found. A queue may be over or understaffed at specific times leading to call overload, long wait times and a poor customer experience. Long Hold times may indicate that an agent needs more training.

Zeacom Reports

The Zeacom suite of reports is enormous. It has grown organically from an original set of 14 to over 250, via individual customer requests over a period of 17 years. A lot of these reports vary only very slightly, these small differences can effect a huge impact on the output generated and the subsequent actions taken by the managers who ran the report.

Research

Idiation meetings were held in house with guest subject matter experts. These were informed by information gathering and card sorting on site visits, and meetings with Japan Airlines, Virgin Games UK, Yellow, Sky City and many others. Wireframes created with Visio and prototyped with Flash were then demonstrated to the participating companies.

Sample Findings and Outcomes

End of Month reporting was extremely stressful for all managers across all industries

The process of running reports and extracting data which can be easily understood by managers and clients is very time consuming.

All managers would export Zeacom reports as Excel documents.

The managers would construct their own reports, copying and pasting from as many as six supplied reports run as many as four times each.

All managers used only Zeacom reporting to construct their bespoke reports.

No additional third party or in-house solution was used. This indicates that zeacom reports do provide all the detail needed, but that this information is not surfaced clearly.

Graphic and Numeric

Managers best understood information delivered to them in two major styles dependent on whether they were looking at Agents or Queues.

Six main groupings of metrics were identified These Groupings could, if presented in real-time, provide an instant, graphic 'health-check' view of a call centre. This, combined with contextually sensitive 'real world' call centre terminology, enabled faster comprehension of displayed information by reducing the cognitive load.

Conclusion

Overall the research confirmed the importance of reporting to our clients. From a Zeacom business perspective, it spawned a host of development opportunities including the development of a real-time reporting application, bespoke report-building software, and an online knowledgebase for call centre managers and team leaders who enjoy sharing their insights, ingenuity and creativity. Development is ongoing on all these projects..