5 Tips to Make Your Contact Center Wallboards Better

• January 15, 2020
• Author: Keith Young

Wallboards are a powerful tool to improve the performance of your contact center. Gone are the days of out-of-the-box, standardized displays. The customizable nature of a cloud-based system gives you the ability to make your contact center wallboards better. 

Our easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor makes customizing the design and content of your wallboard a cinch. Show the statistics and metrics you want with simple graphs, tables and grids. All your data is updated in real time.

To help you make the best use of your wallboards and ensure they’re as effective as possible, here are a few tips.

1. Find out what your agents need.

Don’t assume you know what’s most helpful to your agents. Take the time to have a two-way conversation with your team to understand what motivates them, what information they look for, and how your wallboards can most effectively benefit them.

2. Customize your wallboards for each type of user. 

Not every person in your contact center needs the same information. 

Managers require a picture of the contact center as a whole to help them make strategic decisions about staff and procedures. 

Your call agents might not all need to see the same information. If you have different agents for different types of calls, having a custom wallboard for each type will make your wallboard more effective. 

3. Make it easy to read. 

If users can’t read the wallboard or if looking at it overwhelming or frustrating, they won’t use it. No matter how useful the information on your wallboard may be, if they can’t read it, it’s ineffective. 

Use the right font size. Avoid long chunks of text. Display information in charts, tables or use a grid-based layout. 

4. Keep it simple. 

One way to keep your wallboard easy to read is by keeping it simple. Don’t overload it with complex information. Display metrics to benefit your entire team on a centralize wallboard, but keep individual users’ wallboards relevant to them. 

5. Determine the goal of the information.

What is the purpose of the wallboard? It can be so much more than a tool to get agents to make more calls. Use it to communicate with and motivate your staff. A wallboard can improve morale and should boost performance and team spirit.

Prioritize and display information that requires immediate action. Use key performance indictators (KPIs) that can be worked on in real-time. Metrics that can wait for a weekly staff meeting are best left off the wallboard.

What Information to Display on Your Wallboards

Talking to your team to understand their needs and define goals will help you analyze the best information to display on your wallboards. It should be a more complete and engaging view of the day-to-day business.

Key performance indicators are helpful, but you’ll get greater engagement by including some attention-grabbing information, too. Traditional statistics to monitor include:

• average wait times: average speed to answer time in minutes
• number of callers on hold: current number of callers waiting to be connected to a live agent
• maximum wait time: longest wait time in minutes
• average abandonment call rate: total number of calls abandoned before the caller is connected to the agent
• agents: actions taken by selected agents, including number of answered calls and current call duration
• service level: percentage of incoming calls answered below your designated threshold
• call queues: statistics for selected call queues including all of the above plus number of active calls, number of live agents, number of answered calls, etc.

These are still useful. To change things up a bit, you could show birthdays and celebrations, general company updates, or specials in the employee cafeteria.

The ease of customizing wallboards allows you to change the information they show throughout the day. At the start of business hours, you might want to focus on calls waiting and service levels. As the day progresses, it might be helpful to switch to internal communications. Near the end of the workday, displaying traffic updates would be helpful for agents planning their commute home. 

Make Your Contact Center Wallboards Better

Are traditional call center metrics insufficient for your needs? Is it time to refresh your wallboards to make them more effective and easier-to-read?

Contact a UnitedCloud specialist today to learn how to make your contact center wallboards better.