In my grandpa’s day, waiting a week for a letter to arrive was perfectly acceptable. 

When my mother was a lass the telephone at home meant you knew the latest news within hours. 

Today, if it’s not instant - forget it; just witness the rise of Twitter. 

Now we want to know, and stay in touch, immediately - at any moment of the day or night; totally lost if for a moment parted from the beloved mobile (in fact a school teacher acquaintance assures me the threat of confiscating a pupil’s mobile phone is by far the most effective behaviour modification tool!).

Waiting, waiting, waiting

So it’s bewildering to still see call centre managers waiting, waiting, waiting - sometimes for days - to understand the precise health of current campaigns. The delay is excruciating. By the time you get the full picture it’s too late to revive an under-performing campaign. 

Real-time reporting is where today’s call centres pull away from the doddery ‘grandpas’; campaigns are tuned to optimum, agents can see their hard work racking up and management can adjust agents, call flow, campaign elements and scripts to maximise results and profitability.

But maybe a real-time example is the best illustration.  

A budding outsourcing company…who shall remain nameless…recently took on a telemarketing task for one of Australia’s largest charities.  They qualified the data, script, processes, trained their agents and started dialing.  

The agents waited with anticipation…and waited ….and waited.  After a few minutes agent shoulders started to slump and some sat back in their chairs. The real time reports showed that calls were being made, but telco errors were off the scale. The team leader made some test calls from the data and it became clear that the data was poor.  

Dead impressive

Despite pre-campaign testing and assurances from the client that the data was ‘good’, it was not and the campaign was pulled.  

Now while that’s bad for all concerned, the charity was dead impressed that the data problem could be identified within minutes and action taken.  Needless to say the charity sorted its data and the outsourcer now has a long term client.  

If you aren’t using real-time reporting, if you are still waiting in ‘grandpa’ land, particularly in these uncertain economic times, you are being left behind - watching while others enjoy the big-time.

Maybe now is the time to catch-up?

By Simon Burke

Simon is the CEO at IPscape and while overseeing the IPscape business also finds time to speak at conferences and seminars on next-generation call centres and the technologies that drive them.