New engagement channels, working environments, and priorities are rapidly changing the face of the contact center. As such, operations are revamping many old-school processes, like reporting, with the help of new technology. To meet these needs, many brands turn to Salesforce.
One of the most popular tools for managing call centers (and customer service in general), the Salesforce platform is chock full of features that can seem overwhelming at first. Yet, building call center reports for specific trends and tasks is often a relatively simple process.
Building a Report Using Salesforce Lightning Experience
Salesforce Lightning is an evolution of the Salesforce Classic CRM, providing a new user interface alongside AI-enhanced features for call center agents and managers - such as a customer activity timeline.
Also, it allows developers to harness pre-built blocks of code to create and customize new reports quickly. Meanwhile, they can also harness additional reporting tools through the Salesforce AppExhange in just a few clicks.
Suppose you are building a call center report in Salesforce for the first time or have previously worked with Salesforce Classic. In that case, you can check your organization’s readiness for Lighting Experience before getting started. Once you are ready, follow these steps to build a report.
- Log into your Salesforce dashboard to build a report, and select ‘Edit Mode’ under the ‘New Report’ tab after choosing the type of report you want to generate. Edit data fields to narrow down to columns and rows relevant to your specific report requirement.
- It is likely that you would want to group records to arrive at trends. An easy way to do so is to select ‘Group Rows’. Choose a row, followed by a column, and pick ‘List’ under ‘Group Columns’. You can do this for up to two rows and columns.
- It is sometimes helpful to summarize the cells on your report before getting down to analysis. Doing so allows you to uncover the highest, lowest, and average values in a data set. To do so, visit the ‘Preview Pane’ and select the cells you want to summarize before choosing the function you want to run for the specific data.
- Once you have built a report, opt-in for charts to create a powerful narrative that helps users understand the larger picture. You will find the ‘Charts’ section right above the ‘Reports’ table. It is possible to translate any group data into charts to present your trends related to traffic, customer satisfaction, and lead generation, among other call center metrics.
These steps are tricky to explain without visuals. Luckily, Salesforce has put together the following video to bring this process to life:
Yet to upgrade to Lightning Experience? You may still build reports from the Salesforce Classic interface.
Building a Report in Salesforce Classic
Salesforce Classic remains an effective way to build reports for an integrated or omnichannel call center. Users can opt for standard or custom reports, depending on the fields and data they wish to cover.
Typically, many operations like to start with standard reports and customize them as they go to meet emerging call center needs.
Nevertheless, here is the basic three-step process in Salesforce Classic for creating either a standard or custom report.
