Report Design

Introduction

When designing a report there are few things you need to consider before you start coming up with designs, first thing you need to consider is the metrics included in the report, then the audience of the report what level of detail will they require, and then the time scale how often will the report be produced.

Metrics

When looking at what metrics you are going to add to the report first ask the audience of the report what they want the report for, for example is this report to help drive efficiencies in a certain area of the centre, like AHT, Adherence, Shrinkage etc. or is the report to show general performance of the centre, calls, forecast variance or service level. Within the contact centre there are many metrics and may ways to look at these so deciding the content is an essential step.

Audience

We need to consider the audience as advisors will not want to see how the centre is doing on a monthly basis, they want to know how they are performing and how the people around them are performing, also they probably only want to see yesterday’s figures, the week so far and the overall month, but they may also want a little more detail, for example the breakdown of the AHT, talk time, call work and hold time, also how many calls they took that day. On the other side of the business the board of directors don’t care about individual advisors and only want to see the AHT against what the target or forecast is, they probably don’t care what happened yesterday and will only want to know last month’s numbers.

Time Scale

Again this is probably down to the audience, the board don’t care what happened yesterday unless they have been advised something has gone particularly wrong, so they only care about last month’s figures for when they review how we are performing, but showing an advisor last month’s stats is only going to be relevant if you are comparing with yesterday’s stats to show how they are improving.

Example Report

So let’s say we have decided this report is going to show AHT and that this report is aimed at advisors and team leaders and we will run this report on a daily basis.

First then we need to decide what metrics will go in the report, what will the advisor want to see also what compliments the AHT, it would be no good having AHT and overall site service level on the same report, the information just would not help show the advisor what they want to see. On this report we will put the following fields. AHT, Talk, Work, hold, calls handled and current target AHT. We also want this report to be used by the advisors but the team leaders also want to monitor how the whole team is performing, so pointless creating two reports we will have one report for both audiences.

Now the advisor is only interested in how they performed yesterday, but if we show them the week so far and the month so far they can monitor if they are improving as the month continues. How I would do this is give the report 3 sections, we only need to design one as we want them all to look the same so the readers of the report can quickly find exactly what they want without having to plough through masses of information.

Here is an example of how the report may look. A small piece of advice when adding colours to a report pick a colour and then use different shades of that colour, don’t use a lot of different colours as this can make the report look messy. In my current role I found the Pantene value for the company logo and then found the values of all the shades below this to use in the reports.

Once you have created this part of the report the weekly and monthly sections of the report are the same as this only the title changes keeping the layout consistent, so once a user has found what information they are interested in the next day they can focus just on this and not the whole report.

Conclusion

When making reports follow the three simple steps above and tailor the report to the audience and their requirements and you will find that not only will they love the reports but will use them. There is no point spending hours, days or even weeks producing reports if nobody will read them.

If you have any comments on anything I have said or if you use a different technique please get in touch as I love to get other perspectives as it helps me grow.