There are multiple reasons why knowing an agent's current state and historical state reporting is important for contact center performance and efficiency. Agent state reporting provides awareness of what agents are doing, allows for call, email and chat routing, and enables performance reviews. It justifies positive or negative reviews during annual evaluations by showing time spent in productive versus non-productive states. Monitoring agent states across different contact channels like voice, email, chat and social media also helps managers identify unproductive behaviors like agents extending non-call handling times. Overall, accurate agent state reporting is a vital tool for managers to evaluate productivity, provide feedback, and make improvements across the contact center.

1. Importance of Agent States Reporting July 2017
Common sense. There are multiple reasons for knowing what state agents are currently in and
the importance of this information helps with overall performance and efficiency in the call
center.
 Agent and Manager awareness of current states
 Call, Email, Chat routing
 Performance and efficiency review
Agents being aware of what other agents are doing is vital for daily efficiency in the contact
center. Taking a break, going to lunch, logging into another group, going to a training seminar,
coaching others, there are many purposes for knowing what others are doing so agents want and
need to see the states for others in their group.
There is also a niche where agents need to see their states or more specifically how long they
have been in their state. The purpose of this is to continue to improve productivity by showing
the agent their state no matter the state they are in. Many times managers find that agents focus
on the non-productive states such as ACW / Wrap-Up and take this state to its limit before going
back to an idle or available option. Agents will complain that they were not aware of how long

2. they were logged out and therefore did not change their state. As a manager you are well aware
of the agents that try to take advantage of non-productive states and it is up to you to correct that
agents’ deficiency.
How productive and efficient is the call center is an on-going request from senior management.
Seeing the current agent state as well as historical trends is no longer a nice to have it is a need to
have for the manager. Providing feedback to management is more easily done with historical
agent states reporting. Yearly reviews with agent states information justifies the positive or
negative review the manager gives the agent. Productive, efficient, do their jobs as requested are
all easy to find in a historical report for the agent states.
The columns working state (productive) and non-working state (non-productive) show the agents
productivity. However, the states need to be properly defined. There are states that are non-
productive and unpaid such as lunch. These states should not be included in the reports or if they
are they should be shown as unpaid non-productive states. Then there are states such as training
or coaching that are non-productive but are paid and need to be included. The push back from
the agents will be that they are learning or helping others and overall it will help the call center.
These are all points that you, as a manager, need to work out with the agent.
There are other columns of states that should be included in the manager report; Occupancy and
Adherence. This is WFM data and it is not meant to replace the WFM reporting only enhance
the manager summary reporting for the agents. By including the WFM along with the Voice,
Email and Chat data the manager can get a detailed view of the agent true productivity.
Productivity and efficiency especially from a long term point of view is extremely valuable to
both the agents as well as the manager. A well-defined report that defines the historical
performance of the agent for the last year. Certainly there will be disagreement about some of
numbers but the numbers do not lie they show us what state and how long that agent has been in
that state. Sure it could be the agent did not change their state but that is their responsibility not
the reporting software.

3. In today’s contact center voice is no longer the only method of contact and doing business with
the customer. Beyond the phone there is email, chat and social media. Monitoring agent states
across these platforms is a need to have data source. Many contact centers require hard copy
(email and chat) to finalize business, because it has to be in writing. So as the agents migrate
back and forth from voice to email and chat their state may appear to be useless. This is not true,
however. In fact when you have lazy agents that want to take advantage of not getting on a call
they will extend their email and chat status much longer than needed. For the manager it is not
just the amount of talk time it is email and chat time as well.
Social media has become a venting place for unhappy customers. Utilities often see complaints
on social sites rather than get an actual compliant or power outage notification from a customer.
So to learn of the problem utilities are now watching social sites to learn about power, gas and
water problems. Another downside about this is the agent that begins to work the social sites on
a personal basis as well as for business.
Using a historical report is an outstanding tool during an annual review with an agent. Seeing
their total times in various states speaks volumes about their productivity, efficiency and
willingness to do the job properly. The manager is able to review the agent productivity in
different stages so the occasional poor productivity by the agent will show up on the report. But,
the manager is able to remove those numbers and focus on the annual review rather than the
“oops” by the agent.

4. One challenge that managers must prepare for is the number of different agent states their system
and agents can handle. It is very easy to define 100 different reason codes, however, the
ramifications of this many codes is the downside. Requiring agents to select from a large
number of codes can be difficult. They do not remember the definition of the code, they are too
busy to look up the code, they do not care what the code is as long as it is close to what they are
doing. Some agents randomly select their codes, others start at the top and work their way down
and then start over at the top. Work with the agents to define the reason codes and purpose of
each code. Working with the agents is the right way to win their beneficial efforts.
Having agents use agent states properly will improve not only their productivity and efficiencies
but the overall contact centers productivity as well. Agents want and need to see what others are
doing especially if they are work from home agents. Keeping everyone aware of each other’s
states as well as their own state will provide a much nicer working environment. Historical
reports with agent states is a tremendous tool for annual reviews and being able to see where
internal change is needed.
Spectrum is a leading provider of Unified Contact Center Reporting. Contact Spectrum today to
discuss the Importance of Agent States Reporting for your contact center. For more examples of
reporting visit our website and the products page. http://www.specorp.com/products

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Dan Boehm
VP Sales and Marketing
Spectrum
dboehm@specorp.com
+1 713 986 8839