When you run a call center using Talk, useful call information is recorded about your efficiency and productivity. Zendesk Explore helps you surface this important business information in easy to read queries and dashboards. In this article, you'll learn the basics of what makes up a Talk call, learn how to access your call information in Explore, and learn some of the most common Talk metrics you can measure.
If you're new to Explore and want more help, see Getting started with Explore.
This article contains the following topics:
Understanding Talk calls
To produce effective Talk reports, it helps to understand the high-level flow of a call. A simple incoming call might look like this:
- If the agent declines or doesn't pick up the call, their call leg time ends.
- If the agent calls a second agent to consult, a new call leg starts for the second agent.
- Once the first agent transfers the call to another agent, then the first agent call leg ends.
- An agents call leg is not complete until they complete their wrap-up time (if configured).
Understanding call legs
A common term you'll hear when you work with Talk is the call leg. A call leg is defined as an interaction between a person and the Talk call.
Talk call legs fall into one of two types:
- Agent: Begins when Talk finds an available agent and the agents phone (or browser) starts to ring. The call leg ends after one of the following events:
- The agent declines the call.
- The agent completes the call. The leg ends after any configured wrap-up time for the call.
- The agent transfers the call to a second agent. As soon as the first agent calls the second agent, then the second agents call leg begins. The first agents call leg ends after the call is transferred. When calls have more than one agent leg, it's because more than one agent was a participant.
- End user: Begins after Talk answers the call and the end-user hears the welcome message. The call leg ends when the call is disconnected because either the end-user or the agent hung up.
Understanding key Explore metrics for Talk
When you use Talk with Zendesk Explore, you gain access to a range of pre-built reports that display information about your calls, efficiency, and agent activity. If you need to customize these reports or create your own reports, Explore features a large number of metrics and attributes you can use.
In this section, you'll learn how to access the pre-built reports, and discover some of the key metrics and attributes you can use to create your own reports.
Pre-built reports for Talk
Explore features a range of useful reports for Talk right out of the box in pre-built dashboards. Before creating custom reports, check to see if the report you want is already available.
- In Zendesk Support, open the product tray.
- Click the Explore icon (
) .
- In the list of dashboards, select the Zendesk Talk dashboard.
For information about all of the reports on the dashboard, see Analyzing your Talk activity.
Key metrics and attributes for creating your own Talk reports
If you need a report that doesn't exist in the pre-built dashboard, you can often create your queries. In Explore, you create queries by adding metrics which a quantitative value like the number of tickets and attributes, a qualitative value like the ticket group.
For help learning how to create Explore queries, see Getting started creating queries.
In this topic, you'll learn about some of the most common metrics and attributes you can use to analyze your call center. The following tables detail some of the key metrics and attributes you can use, and where to find the details in Explore.
Key call metrics
The table below defines the key Explore metrics for Talk calls.
Call metric | Definition |
---|---|
Call wait time | The time a customer waited to talk to an agent after being routed to where they want. |
Call answer time | The time between the customer first connecting to the system and the first conference with an agent. Repetition, such as waiting after a transfer occurs, is not included. Voicemails are also excluded from this number. |
Call IVR time | The time spent in an IVR. |
Call consultation time | The total consultation time. Sums the value of any number of agent-to-agent consultations. |
IVR transitions | The number of steps taken through the IVR menu. |
Call billed time | The time that the call was billed for. |
Call on-hold time | The time a call was on-hold from the customer’s perspective |
Call talk time | The time spent talking from the customer’s perspective or the time spent in a conference with an agent. If the call was transferred this will include all agent conferences with the customer. |
Key call attributes
The table below defines the available call attributes.
Call attribute | Definition |
---|---|
Call ID | The ID number associated with the call. |
Call type | The type of call. Values are Callback, Forwarded, Overflow, Regular, Text back, and Voicemail. |
Call completion status | The completion status of the call. Shows whether a call was completed by an agent or to voicemail or whether it was abandoned before that could happen. |
Call direction | Whether the call was inbound or outbound. |
Call exceeded queue wait time | Indicates if the customer exceeded the set time limit waiting for the agent in the queue. |
Call outside business hours | Indicates if call was outside of business hours (true/false). Business hours might vary depending on what schedule(s) have been set. For more information on setting up schedules, see Setting your business hours and holidays. |
Call Talk number | The Zendesk Talk phone number the call came in through. |
Call IVR destination group | The destination group for calls coming out of an IVR. |
Caller with requested voicemail | Indicates if the caller requested to be put through to voicemail. |
Key call leg metrics
The table below defines the available call leg facts.
Call leg metric | Definition |
---|---|
Leg duration | The duration of the call from beginning to end of that call leg. |
Leg wrap-up time | The total wrap-up time in seconds associated with the agent’s call leg. Customer legs will default to 0 seconds. |
Leg talk time | The time spent talking, specific to call legs. |
Key call leg attributes
The table below defines the available call leg attributes.
Call leg attribute | Definition |
---|---|
Leg type | Indicates for which user the call leg was generated. Values are Agent, End-user, and External. |
Leg agent name | The agent name associated with a specified call leg. If looking at an entire call, this attribute will include all agents that had legs associated with the call. An empty value indicates the call leg is a customer call leg. |
Leg ID | The call leg ID. |
Leg agent available via | Whether the agent answered via browser or phone. |
Leg completion status | Displays whether an agent declined an incoming call, if an agent missed the prompt to accept the incoming call, or if the agent accepted it. |
Leg agent forwarding number | The number a call was routed to if a call leg is associated with call forwarding. |
Leg instance | The order the call leg began in reference to the overall call. Customer legs come first, so each call with a value of one. Each additional agent leg that occurs on the call increments this value by one. |
Leg user type | The type of call leg, either agent or customer. |
To read about all of the metrics and attributes you can use to create Explore reports for Talk, see Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Talk.
Creating an Explore report
In this example, you'll use some of the metrics you learned above to create a basic report that, for each of your agents, shows the number of calls they made or received, the end-user name, and the completion status of the call. The report is filtered to show only calls from the current week.
To create the report
- In Zendesk Explore, click the query icon (
).
- In the Queries library, click New query.
- On the Choose a dataset page, choose Talk > Calls > Talk: Calls [default], and then click New query. Query builder opens.
- In the Metrics panel, click Add.
- From the list of metrics, choose Calls, then click Apply. Explore displays the total number of calls made or received.
- In the Filters panel, click Add.
- From the list of attributes, choose Call - Date, and then click Apply.
- Click the Call - date filter you just added.
- On the Call - Date page, click Edit date ranges.
- On the Date range page, choose This week, and then click Apply. Explore displays the total number of calls made or received this week.
- In the Rows panel, click Add.
- From the list of attributes, choose the following:
- Call agent name
- Call direction
- End-user name
- When you are finished, click Apply. Explore displays the completed table.
Next steps
In this article you've learned some of the basics to get you started reporting with Talk and Explore. To read about all of the metrics and attributes you can use to create Talk reports, see Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Talk.
For more help creating custom reports for Explore, see Getting started creating queries.
13 Comments
Hey guys, 2 things I noticed.
1. When you report on IVR destination groups and # of inbound calls, the groups do not allocate callback requests in Insights which makes it a bit hard to report on as you can imagine. Could that be fixed please?
2. Call wait time abandoned calls metrics as setup by you is a bit skewed because it doesn't take into consideration if customers hang up in the IVR, as it allocates a 0 secs to those calls where it should count the time customers stayed in the IVR before they hung up. Maybe more a philosophical question but just thought I'd point it out.
Cheers
Johann
Hi Johann,
Thank you for commenting here! I just wanted to update you that we recently released a fix for the first issue you called out, so you should no longer have difficulty reporting on this.
For the second point you called out, right now the expected behavior is that calls abandoned prior to the greeting ending will have a zero second wait time. We appreciate your feedback on that logic and understand that having the full time spent on the phone can be useful.
Best,
Nicole
Good day!
I'm looking a way to get the occupancy rate via zendesk using the objects in this post.
Occupancy rate- is the % from the valid activities over the required work duration.
Ex: (Total Talk time + Total wrap up + Total on hold + time used for another task/s aside from call) / (Total Talk time + Total wrap up + Total on hold + time used for another task/s aside from call + total avail)
i used:
-Call Hold Time
-Call Leg Duration
-Call Leg Wrap up time
-Call Leg talk time
The result are confusing and totally not making sense to me. Probably because i don't know exactly what those objects that are needed to get the correct output.
Anyone here willing to help please? Thank you very much in advance.
Hi, we're on Talk Legacy plan.
If I view the built-in Insights report for "talk time (mins)" I would only see 10 days of data from early 2018, even after removing the filter for date - showing all dates.
Is this because of our plan type?
Hi Niels!
Insights support for Talk is only available for Professional Talk plans and up. For Legacy Plans, that's Talk Advanced and up.
If you do have a plan that includes Talk reporting in Insights, it's possible another filter is preventing the data from showing up. Try selecting all for the other two filters (number and IVR destination group) and see if that helps. If not, please submit a ticket so we can investigate further!
Quick question on the Call Agent ID fact: We use our own BI tool so I've created a basic report to deliver all the call legs. We're trying to map calls to our agents, but it doesn't appear to let us change this fact to display the ZendeskID, it will only show the display name.
Is there something I'm missing? For facts on other channels I can normally select the fact and adjust Display Label from the detail window/tab-thinger
Hi Jeff,
I did some testing on my end and you are correct, the Call Agent will not show the Zendesk ID of that particular agent unfortunately. I wasn't able to find a way to show the ID on my end for this particular attribute.
The only other alternative I can think of is if there's a ticket associated with each call and the Call Agent is the same as the Ticket Assignee then you can use the Ticket Assignee attribute instead. That attribute will allow for you to show the Zendesk ID instead of the Agents name.
I realize this may not be the solution you're looking for but I do hope it helps!
Can anyone please advise on how to calculate AHT for calls? Ideally I'd like talk, hold and wrap separately
Hey Brent,
I created separate metrics to track each of these at the call leg (agent) level. I have a scheduled report with these metrics (plus Consultation Time (warm transfers) and Call Time to Answer (ASA)) and the total calls handled by each individual agent which goes into our BI tool and calculates the AHT over time.
Talk Time:
SELECT SUM(Call Leg Talk Time) BY Call Leg WHERE Call Leg Type = Agent
Hold Time:
SELECT SUM(Call Hold Time) BY Call Leg WHERE Call Leg Type = Agent
Wrap Time:
SELECT SUM(Call Leg Wrap Up Time) BY Call Leg WHERE Call Leg Type = Agent
Does Leg agent name also include the 'name' of the number of externally transferred calls?
When I apply a Leg agent name data filter to a dashboard I get all kinds of anomalous numbers appearing in the list - not just Zendesk Agent names.
The only explanation I can think of is that if calls are transferred externally (a customer of mine does that often) then the number that the call is transferred to is included in this metric as a Leg agent name.
Otherwise I have no idea 'who' these numbers are if the Leg agent name filter is supposed to show just Zendesk Agents.
(Sorry about pic size - no idea how to scale it in guide comments)
Hey Chad,
I reached out to one of our Talk experts and it could be transferred calls, overflow calls, or conference calls. It may be possible to filter these numbers out using the inbound call filter.
Let me know if you have any other questions for me!
How do reports know which Agents a Call is associated with?
For after hours calls, we use overflow to direct calls to a staff member's mobile number. The mobile number is changed weekly, depending on which staff is on call for after hour that week.
These calls create tickets, which are assigned eventually. Is this how it knows which agent?
Hi Peter,
Thanks for reaching out! There is a default call overflow number attribute that will return the phone number to which an overflow call was directed. You can use this attribute to determine which agents these calls are routed to. You can also create a renamed set to replace the phone number values with the actual name of the agent for easy viewing.
If this isn't quite what you're looking for let us know and we'd be happy to take another look!
Best,
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