1. What is a call centre wallboard, and what is it not?
A wallboard is a real-time dashboard on a large screen where the whole team can see it. It shows the figures that matter at this moment: callers waiting per queue, longest wait, today’s service level, number of available agents. The difference from a report is time. A report tells you what happened yesterday. A wallboard shows what is happening now, so the team can still do something about it.
What a wallboard is not: a management report on a TV. If it holds twelve charts of weekly averages, nobody looks at it any more. Nor is it digital signage with the staff restaurant menu thrown in. A good wallboard for a customer contact centre, whether that is a patient contact centre in a hospital or a municipality’s citizen contact centre (KCC), answers one question at a glance: are things going well, or do I need to do something?
2. First: what does the team need to see?
Start not with the supplier but with the floor. Ask the team leader and two agents which three figures they want to see when they look up from their screen. The answer is almost always the same: how many people are waiting, how long has the longest been waiting, and are we meeting the standard. Only then comes the rest: staffing per skill, opening hours per department, the number of missed calls.
“A wallboard has succeeded when an agent can tell from it in half a second whether she needs to pick up the phone now.”
Think too about who else is looking. A manager wants all teams and locations in one overview, with history for the weekly report. An agent wants a compact little screen that stays on top of the CRM. A director wants a trend once a quarter. Those are three different dashboards, and a good solution makes it easy to set up all three from the same data.
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3. Seven criteria for choosing
With those questions answered, you can compare suppliers. These are the criteria where we see the difference in practice:
- Does it work on your current environment? Cisco, Avaya, Genesys, Mitel, Microsoft: the wallboard has to read the data from your existing telephone system, without migration.
- Can you combine multiple sources? Telephony plus email, chat, an SQL database or a planning tool. A wallboard that only shows telephony soon becomes too small.
- Is it real time, and how real time? Ask about the delay in seconds. A one-minute delay is too much for a queue.
- Can you change it yourself? Dragging widgets, setting a filter, changing a threshold. Without a developer, without a ticket with the supplier.
- Are there thresholds and alerts? Colour codes on the screen and a push notification to the team leader when the waiting time rises.
- Can you show opening hours per department? Crucial in a hospital with dozens of outpatient clinics or a municipality with several service counters.
- What does it store? A wallboard should not store call data or customer details. Check this, also for IT’s GDPR review.
4. Supplier dashboard or independent wallboard?
Almost every supplier of contact centre software includes its own dashboard. It is often free or bundled, which makes the choice a quick one. Still, it pays to pause and consider the limitations. A supplier dashboard only works with that supplier’s system, offers limited customisation and stops working as soon as you migrate.
| Aspect | Supplier’s dashboard | Independent wallboard |
|---|---|---|
| Sources | Its own system only | Multiple systems and data sources on one screen |
| Customisation | Fixed templates, limited widgets | No-code editor, your own KPIs and house style |
| On migration | Start again | Dashboard stays, only the integration changes |
| Cost | Included or per user | Per dashboard, regardless of who looks on |
An independent wallboard, such as Effecta Connect Dashboards, is a layer on top of your existing environment. It reads the data through an integration, and you decide who sees what. When you migrate to another platform, only the integration changes; the dashboards and the agreements with the team stay in place. For a municipality that will be tendering in three years, that is no small detail.
5. Colours, thresholds and alerts
The number on the wallboard matters less than the colour. Agree a threshold per queue that fits your service standard: green up to twenty seconds, amber up to forty, red above that. The team then does not have to do the sums; it sees things turning red and acts. Add an alert for the team leader, so he or she also notices when not looking at the screen.
The same goes for opening hours. A colour indicator per department showing whether an outpatient clinic is open, closing soon or closed prevents wrong transfers and lets you see a peak coming before it arrives. And do not forget the human side: a birthday, a team target achieved or a compliment from a patient on the wallboard sounds small, but teams that see their results feel seen. Home workers see the same screen as their colleagues in the office.
6. Pricing model and administration
Pay attention to how you pay. A lot of dashboard software charges per user who logs in or looks on. For a wallboard that is odd: the screen hangs on the wall and the whole team looks at it. A price per dashboard, regardless of whether three or three hundred people look on, is almost always clearer for a customer contact centre. You can read why in Pay-per-dashboard versus per user.
Look at administration too. Who changes the wallboard when an outpatient clinic changes its opening hours or a queue is added? If that has to go through a ticket with the supplier, it does not happen. With a no-code editor the team leader does it themselves, and adding a widget to ten dashboards at once takes a few clicks. Effecta Connect currently runs 161 dashboards at customers, with 12 integrations and more than 500 users a day; customers do most of the administration themselves.
7. From choice to screen on the wall
Do not choose on the basis of a demo on the supplier’s data. Ask for a Proof of Concept on your own environment and your own KPIs, and let the team work with it for a few months. All IT has to approve for this is a read-only account or API access on the telephone system; exactly what is needed is set out on the page for IT. What you know afterwards is not whether the wallboard looks good, but whether it changes the way the team works. That is the only criterion that counts.
Book a demo and see a wallboard on real data, or first take the Real Contact Scan to see how good the insight into your customer contact centre really is.