The contact center agent is one of the most intensively monitored occupations in the world. Admittedly, in recent times, employee monitoring and surveillance have increased, and we have seen the advent of tools tracking workers both at the office and in the field. In a contact center, from the moment they log in to the moment they log out, agents' behavior and efficiency are measured all the time, and quite often, their compensation is based on their activity.

Since the 1990s at least, contact centers have been organized around reports that are the basis for many business processes. Large contact centers can generate billions of data per day. Each call or interaction is decomposed into events; these events are then aggregated along several dimensions, such as time intervals, agent skills, customer types, queues for calls or messages, outcomes, and so forth.

A ubiquitous sight in call centers is a set of displays showing the current wait time for customers, the service level (for example, the percentage of calls answered within 20 seconds), or the number of calls in each queue. These provide essential information that gives everyone in the center a view of what is going on and helps supervisors make decisions, such as assigning more agents to a queue that is lengthening or asking more agents to log in. The refresh rate of the so-called real-time reports is typically a few short seconds.

Beyond the immediate here-and-now supervision, contact centers generate reports on intervals ranging from 15 minutes to one hour to one day to one week, etc. These reports inform sales or customer service leads on the activity and answer questions like: is the interaction volume going up or down, are the reasons why people call or chat changing, are service levels met, and are disposition codes showing new patterns?

Data are also exported to applications such as workforce management that help schedule agents and track staffing, HR systems for compensation purposes, CRM for updating customer records, and enterprise analytics for deeper analysis of customer journeys.

Contact center reporting is a broad and sometimes complicated set of features – that is why a typical reporting user guide for an enterprise-class contact center platform is in the hundreds of pages, presenting details on every data element and reports structure. It is no surprise that customers find differences between the previous and new solutions when migrating from one system to another. These differences are sometimes obvious and sometimes subtle, making it necessary to review the operation and its needs thoroughly.

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