System information

Queue Status Display
Queue status will often be displayed on a large, wall-mounted panel or a reader board.
Here are some of the kinds of information that might be included:
• Number of agents logged in
• Number of callers holding
• Number of calls in progress
• Current longest hold time
• Average hold time
• Abandon rate
• Service level
Other information might be desired as well; the goal of a queue status display is to
present to both supervisory staff and queue agents a quick visual indication of the state
of the queue at this particular moment in time.
Additionally, individual group or agent performance metrics may be displayed, as an
informational tool.
The Asternic Call Center Stats software is available in an open source “lite” version
that provides a basic status display. There are also several commercial products that
offer this functionality.
Queue Reporting
Queue reporting consists of reports and graphs that supervisory personnel can use to
look at queue and agent performance from a historical perspective. Many of the metrics
will be similar to those of the status display; however, the goal of reporting is to allow
management to monitor staffing levels, identify problems, and analyze trends.
We discussed a few queue reporting interfaces in Chapter 13.
Call Detail Records
While Asterisk does a good-enough job of generating and storing CDRs, the records
are in a very raw format, which makes it difficult to perform any sort of analysis on them.
Enter the CDR reporting package. In the 1990s, when long-distance rates were complex
and expensive, an entire subindustry was spawned by companies looking to help other
companies make sense out of complex long-distance rates. Nowadays, with long-dis-
tance being far less expensive, as well as generally simpler in terms of pricing model,
there is less need for detailed analysis of call records. Nevertheless, many of these highly
experienced companies have added support for Asterisk CDR analysis, and thus if you
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