Omnichannel for Customer Service – Real-time Analytics

Microsoft’s Omnichannel for Customer Service includes “loads” of reporting options. One of my favourite reports right now is the “real-time analytics” dashboard. In this post I will explain why and comment on how you can enable this feature.

It might be worth considering that the real-time analytics dashboard is currently a preview feature. (As of April 2023!) And as a preview feature it maybe subject to change. Plus is not supported by Microsoft for production use. Having said that … this is just a report. So, I would suggest it might be pretty low risk to just have a look to see what insights you can gain.

I have found the real-time analytics useful for supervisors, who can now quickly see which agents are available or busy. (A common must have view!) But as you will see this dashboard gives you access to many more useful Key performance indicators (KPIs).

How do I enable real-time analytics?

Let’s start by discussing how you enable the real-time analytics.

An administrator will need to enable the real-time analytics in the customer service admin center.

You can see below that I have opened my Customer Service Admin Center and navigated to the “Insights” option. Which is under the heading “Operations”.

Quick tip:
You may spot several other dashboards which you could enable in this area. Why not give others a go as well!!

The option you are looking for is Real-time Analytics. If it is off, click “Manage” to enable.

Below you can see that I have enabled real-time analytics. And as I have Omnichannel Voice enabled I have also decided to add the voice analytics.

Great so that’s it?

Maybe not. After I had enabled I personally found it didn’t seem to immediately show in my customer service workspace app. To resolve this, I simply re-published my app and the option magically appeared.

Next you might want to consider security roles.

Personally, I am a system administrator! So, I can see everything by default. But you might want to decide which users can see the real-time analytics dashboard. To do this you will need to grant read access to all user that need this report. You can see below that on the custom entities tab of my security role I have found the “Omnichannel Realtime Analytics” option and given read access.

Using Real-Time Analytics

Now that my real-time analytics dashboard is enabled I can access it from my customer service workspace app, as shown below.

The best way to investigate the KPIs that are available is to have a look in your own system! But I will mention a few of my favourite features.

The real-time dashboard contains four tabs.

• Summary – as you’d expect a summary of conversations and agent status.
• Ongoing conversations – details of active conversations
• Agent – details about agent status, handle times and more
• Voice – KPIs specific to the voice channel

Summary Tab

The summary tab (shown above) includes useful KPIs such as;

• how many conversations are active and in what state.
• Or how many agents are available and have what presence.
• Or how many conversations are active on each queue and channel.

Ongoing Conversations Tab

The ongoing conversation tab shows a “simple” list of conversations and their status.

This view is useful as (like all the tabs) I can filter the data based on multiple parameters such as agent, channel, queue and more.

But if you are a supervisor, you may already have access to much of this information using the “Omnichannel Ongoing Conversations Dashboard”. (Shown below.) The ongoing conversations dashboard has a few differences / extra features. Including;

• As you can see below my ongoing conversations dashboard also showed me details of conversations that were active with my BOTs. (I wonder if this is by design or a “bug”, keep in mind we are looking at a preview feature here.)
• The ongoing dashboard shows me sentiment.
• The ongoing dashboard can include options to allow the supervisor to assign, transfer, monitor and force close conversations. You can’t directly engage in conversations like that from the real-time analytics views.

Agent Tab

The agent tab is my favourite set of KPIs!

Here I get some summary information such as how many agents are logged in, current average handle time, agent status and more.

If I scroll down, I also get the “Agent list”. This is a simple but essential view. As here I can see information for all of my agents. Including their status, how many sessions they have open, how many they have closed (aka conversations completed) today. And more.

Selecting an agents name also “lights up” the blue details button. Clicking that lets me drill into the details for that agent.

Here I get loads more data about the agent’s activity. Including seeing a summary of what percentage of their time has been spent int what state. (I, for example, have been busy for 89% of today!)

I can also see lists showing information about the conversations the agent has engaged in. And, when and how their presence has changed.

Voice Tab

Finally, we have the voice tab.

I felt the statistics here were quite like the other tabs! However, the KPIs are obviously voice channel related which is likely to be your more “active” or “important” channel. (Even in these days of digital transformation!)

So, knowing voice conversation counts, average answer times, abandon rates, average handle times and more for the voice channel is obviously extremely useful.

I hope you have found this information useful. And as I previously stated your best bet to appreciate these KPIs is simply to enable the dashboard and look at your own data. For me the information available on the agent was more than enough justification to start using the real-time analytics dashboard. Enjoy!