Contact Center Reporting: The Challenge of Change

September, 2023

A transition from one contact center vendor to another can present a significant challenge when it comes to contact centre reporting tools and metrics.

Managing Contact Centre Reporting when Switching Vendors

Contact center reporting is a crucial aspect of any customer service operation. Key performance indicators (KPIs) can offer valuable insights into your business’s performance and customer interactions, helping you monitor, analyse and optimise, day to day.

But every contact center platform provides slightly different reports and KPIs. This means a transition from one contact center vendor to another can present a significant challenge.

Contact Center Reporting: The Challenge of Change

The Diversity of Contact Center Reporting

Your business processes and operations may be significantly influenced by the reports your system produces. As a result, changing contact center vendors can lead to a substantial shift in the way you collect and analyze data.

This diversity has both advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, it offers the opportunity to gain new perspectives and insights into your operations. On the other hand, it might demand a complete overhaul of your existing business processes. The dilemma then becomes whether to adapt your business processes to accommodate the new reporting metrics or require your new vendor to reproduce what you’ve always had.

Adapting to New Reporting Metrics

One of the key decisions when transitioning to new contact center technology is whether to adapt your business processes to the reports generated by the new system. This can be a daunting task, as it may require significant changes in how your agents handle customer interactions and how your team measures success.

For instance, if your old system primarily measured customer satisfaction through CSAT scores, and your new system places more emphasis on NPS (Net Promoter Score), you might need to retrain your agents to focus on the new metric. This process may take time and resources, and there’s always the risk that your business performance could suffer during the transition.

Requiring Reproduction of Existing Reports

On the flip side, demanding that your new vendor reproduces the same reporting metrics as your previous system can provide a sense of continuity. This approach ensures that you can continue to monitor your business in a way that is familiar and comfortable.

However, this might limit your ability to adapt to new industry trends or make the most of the improved reporting capabilities that the new system offers. It could also stifle innovation and limit your ability to gain new insights into your operations.

The Balance Between Data and Efficiency

The key to success when transitioning between contact center systems is finding the right balance between data and efficiency. You need to ask yourself whether adhering to the reports you’ve always used is more important than adapting to potentially more informative or relevant metrics.

Ultimately, the decision should be guided by your business objectives, customer expectations, and industry standards. If your old system’s reports were already in line with these factors, then it might be wise to require the new vendor to reproduce them. However, if the new system offers more accurate, insightful, and actionable data, adapting your business processes might be the way to go.

Not Everything that Matters Can Be Measured. Not Everything that we Can Measure Matters.

Contact center reporting is a valuable tool, but it cannot capture every nuance of customer interactions and employee performance. Some aspects of your operations, like the human touch in customer service, may not be adequately represented by numbers and metrics.

In your quest for effective contact center reporting, don’t lose sight of the intangible factors that contribute to customer satisfaction and loyalty.

While metrics can provide valuable insights, they should be used as a means to an end, not as the end itself.

Focus on Business Objectives and Customer Satisfaction

The decision of whether to adapt to new metrics or require the reproduction of existing reports is a critical one, and it should be made with a focus on your business objectives and customer satisfaction. Ultimately, it’s essential to strike a balance between data and efficiency while remembering that not everything that matters can be measured in numbers and KPIs.

Visit our Analytics and Data Feeds page to find out more about measuring and evaluating performance.

For a chat about, or demo of Sytel’s reporting capabilities, then just talk to us.