Newsflash: Every report on the planet has one thing in common; TOO MUCH DATA!

As a leader in the Call Center Performance Management and Business Intelligence space, we see A LOT of reports. Some of them are good, and most of them are not so good. In fact, we evaluate and design so many reports that people consider us “Reporting Scientists” (thank you Rory Welper at Cisco for coining that phrase for us).

Before Latigent starts any deployment we ask the customer to send us samples of their current reports and to define what their end goal is. Inevitably we receive a stack of printed ACD reports, screen shots from archaic real-time displays, and excel files with more tabs than Baskin Robins has flavors of Ice Cream.

I touched on this topic a few months ago in Death by Excel (that was actually the original name of the series but I thought the new one made far more sense). In a recent visit with an old colleague of mine this same topic came up, so I thought it would be a good time to revisit the subject.

He mentioned during our conversation that a member of their Client Services team had created her “ultimate report”.

I said, “let me guess, it has every data element (most of it worthless) that she could ever want or ask for; and will never look at most of it”.

“Yep” was his response.

“Burn it, before the rest of them see it”, I said.

Now, before we get the torches and pitchforks out and start chasing our Client Service Managers (CSMs) around the building, lets look at the real root of the issue:

Lack of information accessibility 

But wait, I just said they are asking for too much data now I’m saying they don’t get enough? Yes. And this actually applies to most of us in our day-to-day jobs, but I’ll use the CSM as an example because I like to pick on all my old cronies.

Think about what happens when a client calls their CSM and asks how many hours were billed vs. staffed for the 23rd of last month. In most environments this would require the CSM to track down and rummage through countless ACD & Billing reports to find the right answer. This usually takes hours or days.

So the logical answer in this environment, at least in the CSM’s mind, is to create a “data insurance policy” by having your IT department stick all of the data into one excel file even though you may never need to look at 99% of it. Seems a bit silly, heh? It’s actually more common than you think.

Now, let’s take a look at what happens when the information you do need to see everyday is buried amongst all the other blubber. It makes it nearly impossible to identify issues, and even harder to act on them.

So the solution?

Create reports that tell a story. You should be able to look at a report and know exactly what happened and WHY.

Try this experiment. Open up any of the reports in your inbox and ask yourself two questions:

1. What was our customers’ experience like yesterday?
2. What was my team’s performance yesterday?

Catch my drift? Sifting through countless columns like, Calls Offered, Calls Answered, and Hours Logged On, really doesn’t tell you much.

My challenge to you is to start killing off the data that doesn’t mean anything. Whittle your reports down to the point that you have just the metrics that you can act on. You can’t take action on calls answered, but you CAN take action on Agent Quality information and the Quality of your Call Volume Forecasts.

As for the information like billed hours that your CSM needs once a month or ad hoc, stick those into a web portal that can be accessed on demand. I call these “Reference Reports”. They’re sort of like an encyclopedia or dictionary; not something you read everyday but is available when you need to look something up.

The rest of the meaningful and actionable information can be stuck into “Impact Reports”; reports that empower you with the information you need to impact your world everyday.

Latigent  will conduct a free webinar on “Creating Reports with Impact” on March 21st, at 11:00-12:00 CST. To register go to www.reportswithimpact.com

-Chris Crosby