So what should a call analytics and reporting platform do best? Provide real time information on agents? Make in depth historical reports on call management available at the touch of a button? Or how about allow supervisors to deploy call groups flexibly to meet peaks and troughs in demand?
How about all three?
Oak Innovation Ltd is not a company which is shy about shouting its credentials. The British-born company claims “we’re not simply a reporting company, but a rich seam of disruptive ideas and technologies that enable businesses and individuals to do things they previously couldn’t, or to do them better.”
Oak’s Evolve software platform is their bid to make contact centres run better. Described as “the next generation call reporting and management solution” which “takes call reporting to the next level,” Evolve combines a wide range of ‘live’ supervisory and monitoring tools with in depth analysis functions in a single pane of glass.
It is therefore positioned to offer the complete solution for the modern contact centre, from making queue management and call handling metrics visible to everyone, to providing the data-based intelligence on which businesses can build improved customer services.
In this review, we will unpick exactly how Evolve helps call centre management, team supervisors and staff ‘do things better’, and whether in this case Oak lives up to its claim to being more than “simply a reporting company.”
How Does It Look?
The UI is arranged somewhat like a spreadsheet, with data set out in tabular form on screen. There is a vertical menu of different functions to the left, opening different panes, such as a supervisor’s overview of live calls in progress, or the reports pages. Visually, Oak Evolve is one of the nicest looking wallboards on the market.
What Can It Do?
Evolve is a software application which provides real-time reporting and performance analytics for contact centres, both formal and informal. Built on the award-winning Oak Communications Platform (OCP), Evolve can be deployed as an on premises software solution, deployed in the data-centre, or can be virtualised in Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware.
Evolve connects with a PBX switch and mines the data generated by the telephone system via the CTI link, using a backend SQL database and analytics engine to process in real time. Built to comfortably handle extremely large data feeds generated by very large contact centres or multi-site operations, the licensing system also makes it very scalable, so you can increase capacity as and when you need to.
The speed and efficiency of the data processing is what powers Evolve’s real time reporting capabilities. The GUI dashboard displays live information including incoming call volumes, call queues, agent status, hunts group activity and measurement against targets.
This is coupled with a high level of supervisory control. Team leaders can pre-empt difficulties at the busiest times by moving calls from one queue to another, simply by dragging and dropping on screen. Supervisors can also access calls in progress as and when required, listening in without the customer knowing they are there, or using the ‘whisper’ function to offer advice to the agent.
A wallboard display shares key real-time information with the whole team. This can be customised to display whatever information is most relevant to the business, be it agent availability, average wait time, queue size or service levels. A neat touch is how the tiles can be programmed to change colour to reflect whether the team is missing, meeting or exceeding targets.
