ShoreTel Contact Center C2G Interaction Reports

Prior to release of ShoreTel Contact Center Version 5.0, reporting was essentially statistical analysis.    The Contact Center had very useful report generation capabilities that included the ability to add and delete columns to existing pre-defined reports.   The reports, however, were generated largely as summary reports based on accumulated totals of events.  For example, you could generate an Agent Performance report that could report the total number of calls presented; total call answered; average call holding time; average talk time over a specified interval.  Though very useful for tracking aggregate call volume, the reports could not track individual agents events.   The ShoreTel Contact Center had no equivalent of the Call Detail Reporting that you might find in the ShoreTel IPBX database.   What information was available was derived by arithmetic manipulation of totals or the equivalent of “peg counters”.    Each agent had a bucket for total calls, but the details of each call were not archived in the database.  This led to reports that indicated total calls for the period were 19.2 as calls were averaged over an interval.

ShoreTel Contact Center 5.0 takes a major step forward in the area of reporting.  A new feature named variously “interaction reporting” or “cradle to grave” reporting has made a major positive contribution to the contact centers already strong feature set.   The database has also migrated from Sybase to MySQL, which completes the database migration strategy that ShoreTel began with version 7 of the IPBX.   In the ECC database contains a table structure that can be generally summarized as a configuration database.    A second database, named C2G has been created and does not appear in contact centers before version 5.    This database contains about 22 tables of which four are effectively the equivalent of “CDR” records.   A table named events, tracks all the incoming event detail and includes a GUID that can be used to link back to the CDR record in the IPBX.    This database makes it possible to create very detailed reports.  For example, assume you needed a report that listed each call handled by a specific agent over an specified interval.   Additionally, you want the agent detail to include a call disposition status  or wrap code.  Prior to the C2G database, this type of report would have been impossible.  With the new C2G database, you can generate the report very easily using any MySQL administration tool, like SQLyog.    Interaction reporting is a major step forward for ShoreTel Contact Center and one that the market will be very excited to receive.  Look for a video update in our online library for a “hands on” look at how to setup configure and make use of Interaction reporting!