Sales Director
Ideal for performance monitoring and great for employee morale, wallboards are a must-have for call centres. This article explains the ins and outs of wallboards and why your business can’t do without one.
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Wallboards are large format digital displays, usually a television screen or projection, that can aggregate real-time call centre data and present it in a practical, easy-to-understand format. The data displayed depends on individual business requirements but might include Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as average talk time, number of idle agents, or abandoned call rate. Some professional wallboard solutions use thousands of data points, while other businesses may only require a few key metrics.
Wallboards are helpful for call centre agents as they can provide informational support such as reminders of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), incentive targets and alerts. Benefits for supervisors include the ability to display a clear real-time overview of the operational status of a call centre.
Wallboards can be configured to indicate that a data threshold has been met and send alerts directly to agents’ personal devices, keeping them informed no matter where they are.
A wallboard is yours to customise and display whatever you want. When you are carefully scanning through data reports trying to find places where you can optimise, ask yourself, ‘is there any data that would have been helpful to know at the time?’
Wallboards can display any key metrics and information essential to the operation of a company; below are a few examples of what can be displayed:
Trends can help a manager understand a call centre’s performance trajectory. By comparing periods, you can answer questions such as, are service levels improving or declining? Importantly, having the right data enables you to understand why a change is happening and adjust procedure accordingly.
Call centre managers are continuously updating policies and procedures, which can be a bit of a headache for agents to keep on top of. By displaying the key changes and points to remember, managers provide agents with a valuable prompt to refer to.
What are the metrics that indicate success in your business? Are agents keeping the goals in sight? It’s essential to be reminded of the objective so a team can move calls in a unified direction. By including KPIs such as sales figures or customer satisfaction, a wallboard can provide agents with a tangible scorecard to focus on.
The innumerable benefits of a wallboard are hard to quantify as there is so much flexibility in how they can be implemented. One creative call centre displays the popular game Angry Birds, with game progression and success directly connected to agent performance. How a wallboard benefits your business depends entirely on your goals. Below are some examples.
Wallboards can be configured to rank teams or individual agents based on performance. This great incentive has been proven to reduce agent absenteeism and can change an often stressful environment into one that encourages camaraderie, focus, and a drive to improve personal productivity. Studies show that this kind of workplace atmosphere “prepares body and mind for increased effort and enables higher performance”, proving that a little bit of healthy competition can go a long way.
Having up-to-date information can help supervisors nip problems in the bud. If the number of available agents drops to zero or there is a sudden influx of related issues, a supervisor can respond accordingly. Wallboards provide actionable data on the fly and can be updated with different information throughout the day, giving agents the confidence they need to stay focused.
Every contact centre agent will tell you that happy customers make the best customers. Wallboards can optimise call flow by reminding agents of procedures and providing solutions to trending issues, leading to faster resolutions, increased caller satisfaction, and reduced time spent on calls.
You wouldn’t navigate a ship based on yesterday’s position, so why run a call centre based on outdated daily reports? Real-time information is the only way to understand the true position of a business at any given time.
Call centre wallboards improve team productivity by making everything they need to know on the fly as accessible as glancing at a watch display.
Notes about company policy can help teams to adhere to Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and offer support such as helpful tips and updates to policy. Real-time data can help agents jump in when needed and work more closely as a team.
If any of the following apply to your business, it may be time to consider a wallboard solution.
If you rely on generating end-of-day reports to make procedural decisions, you may miss out on intraday performance fluctuations.
With real-time feedback, agents can self-adjust in the moment rather than relying exclusively on delayed reporting and manager feedback.
Trying to make sense of raw data from multiple contact centres would be challenging for anyone. Wallboards present the key statistics in an easily digestible format so that at a glance, you can know everything you need to know about all of your locations.
Would knowing that your office is on fire affect your decision-making? By enabling threshold alerts, agents and supervisors can be made aware of critical situations that may otherwise have gone unnoticed.
Identifying a problem but not seeing a clear solution or understanding the cause can be frustrating. It is often the case that so-called ‘problems’ are actually symptoms. For example, if agent performance is dipping down at a particular time of day or day of the week, configuring a wallboard to display trending queries or issues might highlight a routine customer behaviour. A wallboard can be adjusted at any time to display relevant tips or reminders of specific policies and provide the granular data needed to identify the root cause of issues.
What does success look like? What is the best way to measure performance? Try and answer these crucial questions when planning a wallboard.
Don’t overburden your wallboard with too much information. An agent should be able to get all he needs at a glance, even while distracted by an ongoing call. If your business has many essential metrics needed on continuous display, consider spreading it across multiple boards so that employees can immediately reference only the data they need.
It’s all well and good optimising the best possible wallboard configuration if no one can see it. Consider the screen size; is it large enough to be viewed by all employees? If going with plasma or a projector, will it be bright enough to be visible in a well-lit contact centre?
Display easily legible fonts that can be read quickly from a distance and use high contrast colour schemes. There is no need for artistic flair when selecting a font; remember that it’s functionality over form with wallboards.
Display data and statistics in a logical format so that an agent can intuitively navigate to the relevant information without having to think about it. For example, metrics about calls in the queue could be next to abandoned call cost, and calls ended on hold.
Having worked for T2k for nearly 25 years, it's fair to say that Lee is an expert when it comes to all things telephony and business communications. Overseeing the commercial side of the business, he has helped the company evolve and grow through the decades. In recent years, and with the advent of VoIP and hosted telephony, Lee has made sure that T2k is at the forefront of technological developments. With a firm interest in helping businesses navigate the world of telecoms, Lee is responsible for the majority of the content on this website.
