Engage Voice | Intro to Analytics
Last updated on September 01, 2021
Analytics refers to the real-time, historical, and custom reporting portions of the platform in the form of dashboards, stats, and reports. There are three tools in Analytics: Real-Time Reporting, Prebuilt Reports, and Historical Reporting. Real-Time reporting gives you widgets that display data, Prebuilt Reports allows you to download historical data, and Historical Reporting enables you to create custom visualizations of data.
The activity of agents while handling calls in the contact center contributes to the collection of analytics data. Agents record their interactions with leads and customers via configurable dispositions that can be used to track call/chat information and outcomes for reporting purposes.
Throughout these calls and chats, all this information makes its way to the Analytics app, where it’s stored for future, deeper analysis via historical reporting and/or distributed to various real-time reporting applications throughout the system for instant analysis.
Analytics data allows you to examine how your contact center is performing in terms of important stats — such as dropped calls and first-call resolution rates — so you can optimize your operational strategy and meet service-level agreements (SLAs).
When creating Prebuilt Reports where data pulled from the system are ‘historical’ in nature, the metrics for variable data such as SLAs will be reported according to the settings that were in effect at the time of the call. This means that if you adjust the SLAs on a queue and then generate a Prebuilt Report for a past time period, the metrics collected for the SLAs at the time of the call will be reported.
Similarly, for Real-Time reports and Historical Reporting, the metrics for SLAs reported will be according to the settings that were in effect at the time of the call.
You can also use analytics to help identify the high or low points in customer activity, which helps you anticipate surges and plan for them accordingly. You can make adjustments to better manage the schedule of your agents. For example, within Analytics you can view data and adjust how agents are assigned to queues.
Admins can find dashboards and reports in the Analytics app. After you log in, click on the Analytics app represented by a line and bar graph icon. This will take you to the Analytics app page, where you can find Real-time, Prebuilt Reports, and Historical Reporting in the left-hand navigation bar. If you’re coming from the Admin app page, click on the app switcher located on the upper right and select the Analytics icon.
For agents, you can find analytics in My stats via the left nav bar in the Agent app. Agents can keep an eye on their own progress with live agent stats displayed via their dedicated interface, and supervisors can monitor and guide agent progress via configurable live agent stat tables. You can learn more about agent stats by reading My stats overview.
Now that we’ve reviewed the basics, let’s talk about the different forms of analytics available in the Analytics app and how you can use those to retrieve and analyze business data.
Real-Time reporting dashboards
Real-time reporting dashboards are composed of individual widgets that can display your information in numbers, charts, and graphs. You can add prebuilt widgets to your dashboard that include different categories of live data, including inbound, outbound, IVR, cloud routing, and chat activity. You can also add custom widgets that display only the specific data you need.
Most of this real-time data is downloadable (while in chart mode) via multiple formats (including JPEG and PDF files) so you can view, save, or print the information for offline use.
To learn more about Real-Time reporting, please check out our Intro to Real-Time reporting article.
Prebuilt Reports
Reports are a standardized way to get information on more specific activities in your contact center. They enable you to track metrics like Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and SLAs over days, months, and even years.
Prebuilt Reports offers many categories of reports. Most of them are historical reports, but one of them includes real-time reports, both of which you can customize.
The differences between historical and real-time reports lie in timing and storage length. Historical reports can lag up to 30 minutes behind real-time activity but can store your data indefinitely.
Meanwhile, real-time reports provide data that is accurate up to the second the report is run, but these reports only provide access to the last 90 days worth of data.
You may want to create your own custom reports. Contact your CSM to ask about using Direct Database Access to directly retrieve and read the reporting data from the system (additional service or setup fees may apply).
To learn more about Prebuilt Reports, please check out our Intro to Prebuilt Reports article.
Historical reports
In Historical reports, you can create, view, and edit reports by using the analytical designer.
Reports consist of defined sets of measures, attributes, and filters that present your data in visual form. There are default reports available to you, and you can also create reports that display your data in tables and various types of charts.
Reports you create or edit can also be included in a dashboard in Historical dashboards.
Learn more about Historical reports in Intro to Historical reports.
Historical dashboards
In Historical dashboards, you can create, view, and edit dashboards that contain reports and KPI (Key Performance Indicator) widgets. Reports and KPIs on your dashboard allow you to view metrics to visualize how your contact center is performing.
The system creates default dashboards, but you can also create dashboards with custom reports. Reports created in the analytical designer of Historical reports can be included in your custom dashboard.
Read about Historical dashboards in Intro to Historical dashboards.
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