8 Ways Reporting Tools Can Help Your Customers Turn Data Into Results

Every day, your customers generate huge volumes of data — from call traffic and call duration to patterns like peak contact times or time away from the phones. Helping them manage, organise, and analyse this data is key to transforming it into actionable insights that can improve customer service, boost performance, and drive smarter decisions.

Quality reporting tools make this process simple by turning complex datasets into clear, meaningful visuals and answers, saving time and resources. By guiding your customers on how to use these tools effectively, you add even more value to your service. In this blog, our Training Manager, Martin Lippiatt, shares his top tips that you can pass on to help your customers make the most of their data.

1. Asking the right questions

Before running any report, customers should clearly define what they want to find out. This could be:

• Who is our most productive agent?

• Why are response times higher on certain days?

Having a specific question makes it far easier to build focused reports, avoiding overwhelming data dumps. Encourage your customers to be purposeful: targeted data means targeted insights.

2. Investigate anomalies

When running reports, the focus should always be on answering the question they set out at the start. Quality reporting tools offer clear categories to choose from, whether that’s analysing by users, teams, queues, or filtering calls by inbound/outbound and answer status. A good user interface makes this process simple and easy to follow.

Once a report is run, customers should look out for anomalies. If something stands out, encourage them to dig deeper. For example:

• If there was a spike in call traffic, was there a particular event or a recent promotion?

• Did it happen all day or only during certain hours?

• If one agent took significantly fewer calls, was it because they were on a longer call, or working elsewhere that day?

Exploring these factors ensures unusual data doesn’t skew overall insights.

3. Use reports to pinpoint issues and add context

Reporting can help customers pinpoint issues right down to the minute. By spotting trends over time, they can then zoom into specific days — or even hours and minutes — to match irregularities with events that may have caused them. This is essential for identifying recurring bottlenecks like staffing shortages, putting anomalies into seasonal context, and tracking progress against goals, KPIs, and SLAs.

For example, comparing monthly SLA adherence can reveal whether they need to adjust staffing or policies to consistently meet service standards and deliver great customer experiences.

4. Visualise data for instant clarity

Raw numbers can be overwhelming, and it often takes time to figure out what they’re really saying. That’s why it’s important for your customers to focus on the key metrics needed to answer their questions, and to visualise this data with the right kinds of graphs.

• Bar charts are great for comparisons.

• Line charts are ideal for spotting trends.

They should also consider limiting colour palettes, using contrasting colours for clarity, and keeping accessibility in mind. This avoids challenges for anyone who is colourblind or visually impaired. Keeping visuals simple and uncluttered ensures the information is easy to understand. Done right, graphs become a powerful tool for turning reports into clear, actionable insights.

5. Encourage experimenting and refining

Business analytics, like businesses themselves, are never static. They’ll evolve over time. What works well for one of your customers or their teams might not work for another. It is recommended to experiment with reporting in different areas to find out what works best. 

Encourage them to test different metrics and review their reporting setups regularly, to understand which are most impactful and important to know when looking to make data-driven decisions. Configurations should be regularly revisited to ensure they align with evolving business goals. Segmented audience profiles can also be useful as different customers will have different preferences, needs and challenges which are all equally important

6. Make use of scheduled reports

Automated reports save time and manual work while also ensuring accurate and fair results over time. Whether daily, weekly, or monthly, scheduled reports help your customers maintain continuous oversight of their performance.

Most reporting tools allow these reports to be exported as CSVs or PDFs — and quality tools will even deliver them straight to their inbox, making data easily accessible whenever they need it.

7. Turn data into action plans

Ultimately, your customers are using reporting tools to generate insights they can act on. That starts by setting clear objectives, just like the initial question — for example, “We want to reduce average handling time by 10%.”

Encourage them to always ask “why?” when reviewing data, so they understand the root causes behind trends. This well-rounded understanding leads to more effective action plans, which can then be broken down into steps and measured along the way. Tracking these steps is essential for refining approaches and proving the impact of any changes.

8. Highlight the value of investing in the right tools

Finally, having efficient, user-friendly reporting tools is crucial for your customers to get the most from their data. They should look for tools that:

• Integrate well with their existing communication platforms

• Offer built-in, robust analytics features

• And are designed to deliver exactly what they need

Not all solutions are created equal, so guiding your customers to choose wisely ensures they’ll have the best foundation for their data-driven decisions.

Helping your customers make informed decisions

By asking the right questions, collecting the most relevant data, and presenting it in a clear, simple way, your customers can use these insights to enhance operations and improve customer experiences. With the right tools and a mindset of continuous refinement, their data becomes one of their most valuable assets — and you can be the partner that helps them unlock it.