Avaya reporting solutions are a gold mine of facts and insights about your contact centre but if you don’t know which metrics to use, it's easy to get lost in the terminology. With Avaya CMS and Avaya IQ, one of the most commonly misunderstood concepts is Arrived calls vs Offered calls.
Avaya CMS and Avaya IQ reports will show you both Arrived and Offered calls - but which should you use?
A common contact centre KPI, Service Level, is calculated (usually!) as the number of calls answered within your defined service goal divided by the total number of calls and, when measuring intra-day performance, the distinction between when the call arrived and when it was completed is vital to an accurate calculation.
Let's look at some data items used to calculate KPIs in the context of Avaya CMS:
Data Item | Definition |
ACCEPTABLE | The number of calls answered within the defined service goal – e.g. 20 seconds. |
I_ARRIVED | The number of calls which were queued in the current interval. |
CALLSOFFERED | The number of calls which were disposed in the current interval. Disposed means that the call falls into one of the following categories ACDCALLS, ABNCALLS, BUSYCALLS, DISCCALLS, OUTFLOWCALLS, and DEQUECALLS. The only item important to this example is ACDCALLS. |
ACDCALLS
| The total number of calls answered and completed. |
Digging Deeper
The most common use for this type of data is a feed to Work Force Management (WFM) so it may seem logical that you want to measure based upon when the call arrived. Statistically, however, arrival data is useless for calculating a staffing requirement. Because the call hasn’t finished, you’re measuring your successes and failures against outcomes which haven’t yet occurred.
Take this example of intraday data calculating service level using calls arrived (column 5) and calls offered (column 6):
Reporting Interval | ACCEPTABLE | I_ARRIVED | CALLS OFFERED | Service Level (ACCEPTABLE/I_ARRIVED) | Service Level (ACCEPTABLE/CALLSOFFERED) |
09:00 | 20 | 24 | 22 | 83.3% | 90.9% |
09:30 | 30 | 32 | 30 | 93.8% | 100% |
10:00 | 25 | 22 | 26 | 113.6% | 96.2% |
10:30 | 20 | 23 | 20 | 87.0% | 100% |
The 10:30 interval (row 4) in the above table is an example of the concept. 20 calls completed in that interval with 23 arrivals – that means the outcome of 3 calls will not be determined until the 11:00 interval or later.
To the Point
KPIs and forecasting should always use calls "Offered" with Avaya CMS and Avaya IQ or the equivalent disposed call data on other contact centre or CCaaS platforms. KPIs must be calculated on the outcome rather than the speculation of one, which is all "Arrived" provides.
When it comes to reporting, this is the just the tip of the iceberg. If you have questions or would just like to better understand your data get in touch, we're happy to help.