In most call centers, it is not enough simply to be able to route calls correctly. Of equal importance to most queues is the ability for supervisory and management staff to determine how the queue and the agents are performing. For this, two things will be of benefit: live queue status information, and some manner of reporting package.
Queue status will often be displayed on a large, wall-mounted panel or a reader board. Here are some of the kinds of information that might be included:
Other information might be desired as well; the goal of a queue status display is to present to both supervisory staff and queue agents a quick visual indication of the state of the queue at this particular moment in time.
Additionally, individual group or agent performance metrics may be displayed, as an informational tool.
The Asternic Call Center Stats software is available in an open source “lite” version that provides a basic status display. There are also several commercial products that offer this functionality.
Queue reporting consists of reports and graphs that supervisory personnel can use to look at queue and agent performance from a historical perspective. Many of the metrics will be similar to those of the status display; however, the goal of reporting is to allow management to monitor staffing levels, identify problems, and analyze trends.
We discussed a few queue reporting interfaces in Chapter 13, Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) Queues.