Why Your Call Center Needs a Wallboard (And How to Do It Right)

Thinking about introducing wallboard software in your call center? Wallboards often prove the inflection point for many customer-facing businesses; introducing productivity gains and driving better customer experiences.

So, why doesn’t every call center have one?

Sometimes, the answer lies in the lack of awareness of just how impactful they can be. That’s exactly what we will convey in the sections that follow.

You’ll learn why call center wallboards are helpful, the key metrics to display, and even what not to display in front of your call center agents.

Why Are Call Center Wallboards Helpful?

Interactive wallboards give you and your staff a bird’s eye view of everything happening at any given time. It could be as simple as the number of calls waiting in a queue (so you can think about wrapping up calls quicker or adding more staff to the shift) or more strategic figures like average handle time (AHT) or first call resolution (FCR) that help gauge how efficient you’re providing customer service.

Here are the key benefits you can expect when adding a wallboard to your call center:

Offers instant visibility into agent performance

Think of a wallboard as the gateway to real-time metrics. Call center managers and supervisors can instantly check on call center performance and identify issues.

By providing a holistic view of what’s happening day to day, senior staff can better facilitate rapid decision-making and responses.

Enables proactive management

When managers can spot issues like increased call abandonment or longer wait times, there’s no need for delays in making changes. You no longer have to wait until you next check your weekly analytics or get your performance report from higher up.

Instead, you can set alerts and notifications for when service levels drop — and take corrective action instead of firefighting when it’s too late.

Enhances agent motivation

By visualizing productivity and performance publicly, agents may be more motivated to maintain higher performance levels. After all, nobody wants dropping graphs and red alerts next to their department.

On an individual basis, displaying top performers creates a healthy competitive environment without publicly shaming lower performers. The fight for the top spot is a healthy one, with contact center agents all vying for personal pride or even company incentives.

Encourages transparency

When you display wallboards, you establish transparency, clearly defining expectations and promoting accountability across teams.

It becomes clear to all personnel that they contribute to a wider cause rather than going through the motions in their day job. If your teams are well-incentivized and have a view of how they’re performing as a unit, they’re more likely to react positively when something isn’t right.

Key Metrics to Display on Call Center Wallboards

Average wait time

It’s best practice in any call center to prioritize how long callers wait before their call gets answered.

• Impact of display: Agents and supervisors know there’s a bottleneck and can identify the root cause, speeding up the time to answer.
• How agents can influence: Teams can work on techniques to help wrap up existing calls more quickly, increasing the number of agents available to handle incoming calls.

Call abandonment rate

One of the least desirable outcomes in your call center is that a customer or prospect calls in but gives up before they get through to an agent. Call abandonment rate is the aggregate number of callers who disconnect before speaking to an agent.

• Impact of display: Agents know they’re missing calls and focus on providing fast resolutions so they become free to handle new inbound calls.
• How agents can influence: When struggling, agents flag that they are focusing on providing quality answers rather than fast answers and need more staff resources during this particular shift.

FCR

FCR measures how often customer inquiries get remedied the first time they call in. When this doesn’t happen, customers must make another call and start the process over again. This leads to customer frustration because they had to call, queue, and explain their problem once more, and they didn’t get a remedy the first time they invested their time with your agents.

• Impact of display: Repeat callers indicate that agents need to ensure genuine resolution of problems rather than assuming calls are completed with one suggested action for remedy.
• How agents can influence: Agents should quality check the problem has been solved during calls to avoid the same customer calling back with the same issue.

AHT

As one of the most important metrics in your arsenal, AHT shows the average duration of each call, including talk time, hold time, and follow-up time.

• Impact of display: If calls are taking too long, supervisors can identify agents who need extra training to help provide more timely resolutions.
• How agents can influence: If AHT exceeds your threshold, agents can see obvious warnings, focusing on more efficient follow-up time and not allowing excessive holds between queries.

Agent status and availability

Agent status availability displays the current agent availability and shows how many/which agents are taking breaks. It also indicates idle times of agents versus how long they’ve been available.

• Impact of display: Agents know they can’t sit idle when calls are backing up. This drives an environment of being available to maintain company standards.
• How agents can influence: If fewer agents are available than needed, agents working on offline tasks can join the call queue ready to help field phone calls.

Service level agreements

Each call center should have a desired (or guaranteed) percentage of calls to answer within a set time frame. This may form part of customer agreements or be used as an internal key performance indicator (KPI).

• Impact of display: This indicates a need for alternate workforce management planning or internal training to make more agents available faster.
• How agents can influence: Agents flag when they need extra support (either staff levels or training to help action queries faster).

Sales & revenue metrics

Call center wallboards can also show monetary metrics such as sales volume, conversion rates, or revenue generated per agent in addition to call-based measures.

• Impact of display: This correlates call volumes with sales activity, showcasing the performance of teams and individual agents.
• How agents can influence: By learning what types of calls contribute to revenue generation, agents prioritize specific languages, behaviors, and patterns.

Customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) & net promoter score (NPS)

If your business measures CSAT or NPS, display this real-time customer feedback so agents can see immediate responses and know how they are performing on a call-to-call basis.

• Impact of display: Agents know exactly how customers respond to specific language, resolution times, and on-call behavior.
• How agents can influence: Agents can change certain call behaviors, ask for help mid-call, or flag extra training if customers have given a low score following a call.

Queue length

If wait times are excessive, your customers aren’t going to be happy — even if the rest of the call goes well. Choose to display the number of callers waiting, maximum wait time for the day, and current queue statuses.

• Impact of display: Staff know whether they’re maintaining a good call answering cadence or whether changes need to be made to rotas, training, etc.
• How agents can influence: If queues exceed an acceptable level, agents can speed up calls if customers are simply chatting post-resolution.

Performance Metrics to Avoid Displaying on Wallboards

They say the more you know, the better off you are. But some things are best left behind closed doors. Here are some metrics you should keep for management eyes only.

Individual error rates

The goal of a contact center wallboard isn’t to highlight who is underperforming in public. Always avoid displaying metrics that may embarrass agents or create negative feelings.

There’s no benefit in public humiliation, so deal with individual errors or shortcomings privately.

Excessive historical data

Real-time metrics are the most effective. Managers, supervisors, and admins can all react when they see data changing in front of their eyes.

Avoid excessive historical data or overly detailed, static reports that can clutter or overwhelm viewers. These tend to cause disruption rather than enhance agent productivity. Leave a wider scope of problem-solving to those tasked with it.

Complex metrics requiring explanation

If it’s not obvious, it doesn’t belong on a wallboard. For complex metrics that need a deep dive and further discussion, leave this to quality assurance analysts and supervisors who know how to manipulate data and deduce potential outcomes of suggested changes.

Metrics should be easily understood at a glance. Avoid overly complex data that requires detailed analysis or interpretation.

Examples of Call Center Wallboards by Use Case

Sales call centers

Sales wallboards may display call-based metrics like call abandonment rates and wait times, but the major focus of sales teams is revenue and lead generation.

Display metrics like:

• Daily number of sales
• Daily sales targets vs. achieved sales
• Conversion rates
• Revenue per call or per agent
• Daily revenue

While both types of metrics are important to track, adjusting to a sales and revenue approach means you focus on making money rather than making calls.

Customer support call centers

Focus your customer service wallboards on time to answer, time to remedy, and whether that remedy is a sufficient one so customers don’t need to call back a second time.

Highlight metrics like:

• FCR
• AHT
• CSAT
• NPS

Omnichannel call centers

For a unified customer experience, introducing non-voice channels (like email, SMS, web chat, and social media messaging) means monitoring and measuring performance outside of incoming and outbound calls.

Unified customer experience management, therefore, must include metrics like:

• Response time across channels (email, chat, social media)
• Omnichannel handle time averages
• Response time comparison
• Channel utilization
• Channel split

Tips for Motivating Performance With Wallboards

Simply turning on a wallboard in your contact center won’t impact your call center strategy. While it will immediately give you real-time metrics, it’s how your team members respond to this information that drives business changes.

Here are four key areas to focus on once you’ve implemented your call center wallboard.

Embrace call center gamification

Contact center gamification is the introduction of reward systems, badges, or XP progression to encourage agents to hit performance targets consistently. You can use an add-on widget to existing wallboards or create a standalone leaderboard.

The most basic component is a leaderboard to encourage friendly competition. You may also choose to offer rewards (recognition, prizes, extra vacation days, etc.) to motivate consistent high performance.

Highlight positive achievements

Nothing reinforces your faith in an agent like celebrating top performers, milestones, and achievements. Complement your leaderboards with a display of top performers to create healthy competition without causing embarrassment.

Note: Some staff may prefer a “well done” in private. Use situational awareness and get to know your staff before blowing up 20 balloons to celebrate a shy top performer.

Use color and visual cues thoughtfully

An often-missed tip for ensuring wallboards get used is to leverage color coding to highlight key areas needing attention.

• Red for low service levels
• Amber for run rate call answer rates
• Green for achieving targets

Whatever your color scheme, ensure clarity and readability to avoid overwhelming visuals. It’s a good idea to create a template of successful color codes for other departments to replicate.

Set realistic and attainable goals

Rather than shooting for the moon, use your wallboards to track achievable goals that motivate agents positively rather than create stress.

Regularly update those goals to maintain engagement and relevance. If goals expire or become less achievable over time, agents may start to ignore them.

Scale Your Contact Center With Nextiva

When you’re thinking about adding wallboards to your contact center, you need a real-time, data-rich, and easy-to-use platform underpinning them.

By choosing Nextiva, you get access to:

• Fully customizable dashboards: Tailor your wallboards to display the exact KPIs most impactful for your team, driving engagement and productivity.
• An intuitive, easy-to-use interface: Get quick access to critical insights without complex IT support, simplifying decision-making across your team.
• Unified CRM integration: Integrate communication channels and customer data seamlessly, giving agents a complete, actionable customer view with access to the latest API functionalities.
• Real-time, actionable insights: Get immediate access to KPIs, ensuring proactive management and continuous improvement.

Ready to explore the top-ranked AI-powered contact center solution? Check out Nextiva today.