Reporting Software

Call Center Reporting Software Overview?

In any call center environment, reports are of great importance. Call center reporting consists of the data that is collected from daily inbound and outbound calls.

Typical call center reporting might include: call attempted, calls completed, calls dropped, messages left, busy signals, etc. A clear understanding of when calls are placed and to whom they are placed makes call center staffing and productivity issues and planning easier to understand and undertake.

A predictive dialer report consists of: agent names, hours logged in, talk time, contacts per hour, etc. This helps with scheduling issues, performance evaluation and more. Call center reporting software helps you understand how well your call center agents are doing and where changes need to be made. Some call center reporting software deals with activity history by agents, activity history by queues, agent performance trends, call volume by time of day, call logs, talk, wait, ready times, call outcome activity, service level activity, list progress activity, outbound dialing activity, hourly productivity, summary productivity, etc.

Most of the packages provide reports in a browser-compatible format to distribute performance statistics via an intranet or the Internet. Contact center managers can view information almost anywhere with a click of the button, reducing costly production and collating times. The software can also capture and provide a complete history of each and every contact transaction. There are many reporting software packages available online and their updates are put on the Internet at regular intervals. But the most important factor is to select a package that works for your company in order to get the maximum output.

How to choose your reporting software?

When it comes to reporting, Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains suffers from the same reporting issues that other ERP or accounting systems suffer from. Which reporting software should the company use? What does everybody else use? What reporting software is the easiest? While there is no easy answer to these questions, here is part one of a four part review of the most common reporting tools in Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains. The reporting tools that will be discussed are; Great Plains Report Writer, Crystal Reports, SmartList, and FRX Software. While there are many more reporting tools for Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains, these four tools are the undisputed champs for Great Plains reporting tools by customer volume. This four part series will look at the products advantages, disadvantages, and recommendations for use.

Great Plains Report Writer Advantages

• Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains has always used Report Writer as the default reporting tool.

• This longevity has allowed reports to be added to the Great Plains software to the point at which there are literally hundreds of reports that come out of the box with Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains.

• Modified Reports can be run from the same location as the original report.

• The base Report Writer program hasn't changed so this has allowed for reports to be upgraded over the versions with very minimal difficulty.

• These reports can be customized not only in report writer, but since the ability of exporting the reports into a package file; they can now be modified through package files in notepad.

• For those users that have VBA Modifier, these reports can also have logic built into the report that wouldn't be available otherwise.

Disadvantages

• The learning curve on Report Writer is quite high and trying to do anything beyond moving fields in reports can take a lot of time and research.

• There are no wizards to help with report creation and the tools within report writer just don't compare to some third party products.

• Anybody running a report need to have a Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains login to run the report.

• While Microsoft is converting base reports to a more aesthetically pleasing graphical format, too many of the reports are in a text format that is for dot matrix printers.

• Creating a report from scratch is an undertaking that is usually completed by a Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains expert that has used the product for a number of years and is used to the table structure of Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains.

Conclusion

All accounting software packages need a reporting tool. The sheer volume of available reports in Report Writer makes this a very easy tool to market and show functionality. For those users that know how to use Report Writer, it is easy to keep the system streamlined by using this as you main reporting tool. However, Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains Report Writer is proprietary software that only Great Plains uses, and other reporting programs that grab data from a database are easier to learn. Because of this, a lot of users are moving there main reporting tools to reporting software that includes wizards for easy report building, no need for a Dynamics user account, or even cube analysis.

Report Writer is still the default reporting tool that all users are going to use. But the latest trend has been to create reports using more user friendly reporting software and leave Great Plains Report Writer to tasks such as printing cheques, trial balances, posting journals, and control record reports.

Add to: File Insurance Business article Teen Photo Images