As much as the majority of television advertisements seem designed solely to annoy viewers, sometimes you have to take your hat off to the people behind them for hitting just the right note. Those Ronseal ads with the strapline ‘it does exactly what it says on the tin’ fall into that category because, let’s face it, we all appreciate a product which does exactly what it says it should do.
RingCentral Live Reports is what we might now call a Ronseal product – you don’t need to be an expert at cryptic crosswords to work out what it does, it is right there in the name. Just for the sake of complete clarity, it is a call analytics software platform which provides – you guessed it – real time reporting on call management and performance.
Live Reports is not a standalone product, but is offered as an optional extra as part of the RingCentral Office hosted cloud PBX. As historical analytics is bundled in with the Office platform, Live Reporting does not concern itself with data storage and long term analysis. Its focus is purely and simply in-the-moment visibility, providing management, supervisors and agents with graphical dashboards outlining how individuals, groups and the whole team is performing against key metrics for call quality and service.
In this review, we will assess whether this kind of focussed, modular approach to in-play insight offers any particular benefits to call management, as well as looking in detail at exactly what RingCentral Live Reports can do.
Please note, UC Today does not have any role in the sale of any product. Our reviews are entirely independent and aimed only at helping our readers make informed choices with their UC product purchases. If you’re researching call reporting for the first time, try our call analytics 101 buyer’s guide for guidance on what you need to know before purchasing.
How Does It Look?
The Live Reports GUI is built around a number of ‘widgets’ displaying the relevant performance metrics. These are a mix of text and numerical data, plus graphic charts and visual markers. The overall layout is very simple, clear and easy to scan, with good separation between objects and a simple colour palette on a plain white background ensuring everything is very easy to read.
What Can It Do?
Live Reports is an additional hosted service available as part of the RingCentral Office cloud phone system. It provides real-time reporting on inbound and outbound calls. Measuring and analysing data from the PBX system, performance metrics are displayed on graphical dashboards for easy visibility and interpretation.
Information is displayed in ‘widgets’, with seven categories available:
- Service level
- Call volume
- Agents Count
- Agents Details
- Queue Monitor
- Queue Details
- Queue Calls
These can be added to or taken off the dashboard simply by dragging and dropping from a menu, so the interface is fully customisable according to what the user wants to display.
In addition, each of reporting categories can also be further customised, giving more than 30 different metrics to display overall. For example, Service Level reporting can be customised by setting a call answering threshold in seconds, and a percentage target for the number of calls answered within that time. You can also define different SLAs for different queues or teams, with different targets and thresholds.
Overall, Live Reports is designed to give supervisors a clear picture of call handling and performance as they go along. This includes oversight on agent performance, with analysis of calls taken and availability times, but also the ability to make strategic comparisons between call volumes/queue data and agent activity so staffing levels can be adjusted. The idea is to give supervisors a means of spotting trends as they happen, so they can respond as quickly as possible.
Access to the dashboards can also be given to agents, either by connecting to an external wallboard display or by changing privacy settings so they are visible to other users. Full access to the platform, or ‘ownership’, is available via a user license, which gives full permissions to create and amend dashboards. Licenses need to be purchased by any live reports admin or person being monitored (not just admins).
The Live Reports interface can be accessed in any of three ways. With a RingCentral Office licence, subscribers can find the dashboards both on the RingCentral Online interface and on the RingCentral Mobile app, as an additional option under Reports. In addition, there is also a dedicated Live Reports website which subscribers can log onto using their normal RingCentral credentials.
What do we like?
The degree to which you can customise the dashboard makes Live Reports a very flexible tool. You can pretty much configure it to monitor and display whichever call stats are most relevant to your business, you can update thresholds and targets as you go along to try to improve performance and adjust focus onto different areas as and when required.
The widget based interface is very clear and user friendly, and we like the fact that the dashboards can be shared on a read only basis using subscriber’s permissions – this makes it a very cost effective option for sharing live analytics across a whole team.
Who is it for?
RingCentral Live Reports is for existing RingCentral Office users who want to gain better intelligence on how the business is handling customer calls, and wants ‘live’ visibility so call management can happen in real time.
What is it compatible with?
RingCentral Live Reports is only compatible with the RingCentral Office hosted PBX.
Where to buy and for how much?
Contact RingCentral UK directly for information about pricing plans.
UC Today Opinion
In truth, assessment of RingCentral Live Reports has to be qualified by the fact that it is not a standalone product available to any and all customers – as part of the RingCentral Office architecture, its performance and attributes depend in no small part on the relative merits of that product, which you can read about here.
However, Live Reports does flag up some benefits to taking this kind of modular approach to call analytics and reporting, as opposed to the single pane of glass, all in one approach. By offering real time performance analysis as an optional platform in its own right, of course, you are giving people the choice as to whether or not it is something they want or need. And developing a dedicated live reporting application has perhaps allowed RingCentral to focus in depth on usability and flexibility. The level of customisation available within Live Reports is highly impressive, providing a basis for the adaptability businesses want with real time performance insight.
What have your experiences of RingCentral Live Reports been like? How did you find having a dedicated real time call analytics platform as an optional extra, rather than integrated with the rest of your call management software? Does it make that much of a difference? As always, we would love to read your thoughts in the comments section below, and please share this article with any friends and colleagues who may be interested so they can join in.
