What is an ACD Report?

The way that contact centers interact with their customers is changing. As with all industries, we must adapt to meet the changing needs of our clients and the ways they need us to communicate with them.

Interactive voice response (IVR) software is getting an AI upgrade, with abilities to gather data from customers and anticipate necessary routing actions based on the information gathered but also using specific interaction histories. Customers expectations are evolving with the rapid advancement of technology across so many different fields, and businesses have to strive to stay one step ahead and anticipate their needs to optimize the customer experience.

With the rise of AI and chatbots, it’s only natural that the human-led customer experience needs to improve. While these automated systems have their advantages, such as cost-effectiveness and 24-hour accessibility, their ability to understand the complexities of some issues and customer queries is not reliable enough, and that is where human-led client support still wins out. We also must not forget that people still value the personal touch that comes with human interaction. It helps customers relate to a brand and reinforces the relationship.

The modern customer wants quick and high-quality support that is accessible and reliable, regardless of where they are or the contact methods they have access to. The past few years have seen a rise in social media as a way for consumers to engage with businesses, but also as a way to get a speedy response when they are unable to or don’t want to call or email.  For some customers, traditional methods still hold strong, and they want to speak to someone on the phone. Having the choice of these different methods of contact is important to consumers and allows them to feel like they have ownership of how they engage. This omni-channel system is only going to grow and pick up speed moving forward.

An automatic call distributor system is an integral tool for tracking the quality of our client interactions and managing agent performance. These systems allow inbound queries to be distributed fairly to agents taking into consideration skill level and availability, across multiple platforms: email, voice, rich web chat, SMS/text, and social messengers.

Utilizing this software allows businesses to hone in on the individual strengths of their teams to provide the best support available. ACD reporting software also recognizes time zones and can match customers to contact centers closest to their locality.

An ACD report captures all of the live data from these cross-channel interactions and collates them into accessible analytics that can be used to record agent performance, track campaigns, as a training resource, for budgeting and service management. They have myriad uses.

As businesses optimize their omni-channel ACD systems, they are also updating the way they store and share the data these reports produce. With cloud-based systems having worked out their initial teething issues and coming back with superior security, businesses are feeling more confident in evolving alongside the technology they use. Cloud-based systems allow for a much easier way to share data globally between businesses and clients alike, as well as making collaboration far smoother as documents are not confined to a specific server in a particular time zone. Just as the omni-channel ACD systems are streamlining the way the customer interacts with businesses, the cloud-based systems are streamlining the way the businesses process that data.

Digital innovation is changing the structure of how modern businesses are developing and will continue to be important, enabling a business to leverage the intelligence of the whole company through the support of ever more intelligent software and systems.