Tips on How to Modernise Your Reporting, To Empower Managers to Make Better Decisions
With Immanuel Joseph, Reporting Manager at Allianz Australia
Show Notes
Immanuel Joseph is the Reporting Manager at Allianz Australia.
With a master’s degree in IT, Immanuel has worked in the Allianz contact centre for the past 4 years to modernise their reporting.
Today, he shares tips from the journey Allianz has been on to modernise their reporting, so you can do the same, and empower Centre Managers and Team Leaders to make better decisions.
You'll Learn:
3 critical problems with using Excel for reporting (01:34).
The 2 key steps Immanuel took to migrate reporting to being live and online, which reduced costs and increased buy-in from managers (04:39).
The way the contact centre has created a scalable framework so they can produce any number of reports with the same ease (08:15).
Why having people with an IT background in your contact centre can save your centre money, and solve your problems quicker (10:49).
Tips on a better approach for using Excel for reporting (12:05).
Transcript
Blair Stevenson (00:00)
Welcome to the Secrets to Contact Centre Success podcast, connecting you with the latest and greatest tips from the best and the brightest minds in the industry.
I am Blair Stevenson, founder of BravaTrak. Our Sales Leadership System enables contact centres to increase revenue and achieve their sales growth targets.
Today I'm fortunate enough to be joined by Immanuel Joseph, who's the reporting manager with Allianz Australia.
So, Immanuel, welcome along. Great to have you.
Immanuel Joseph (00:26)
Thanks Blair. Thanks for having me along.
Blair Stevenson (00:29)
You're most welcome. Tell us a bit about your background and your experience.
Immanuel Joseph (00:34)
I come from a background in information technology, so I've completed my master's degree in IT, here in Australia, and worked with other business units in roles around reporting analyst, or business analyst kind of roles.
So it's actually engaging with the operations a bit more and building out reporting that I needed for the operational activities, to monitor performance and growth of the business.
I've been with Allianz for just over four years now. I started in 2017 as a performance analyst, where they wanted someone to come in and review all the reporting that they were doing for the contact centre and then make a case for improving the system and the solutions that are offered as part of the reporting team.
Blair Stevenson (01:27)
So when you started that process, what did you discover about the approach being used for reporting at that time?
Immanuel Joseph (01:34)
So I think as you would normally expect, most of the reporting was done on an ad hoc basis using Microsoft Excel as the solution. And almost all the reports that were produced were pretty big in size. So approximately talking about 50 megabytes for a file.
And the larger the file size, there's always disadvantages of them taking so long to even open and actually make any use of it. So most of the reporting that we discovered when I started here was done in Excel and it was huge.
And it was actually put together by a few people who knew Excel, but I think that you kind of see that in most operations, where people try to make use of that skillset that they have to produce the best possible outcome. And that's what we discovered.
Blair Stevenson (02:31)
Yeah. So I guess with that reporting, a couple of things; it could take quite a long time just for a file to open, and only one person at a time I imagine could access that reporting.
Immanuel Joseph (02:41)
Yeah. So it would be placed in a network directory. So if a person's working on it, the other person trying to open it would have to open it read-only and can't make any changes, or even make the system a bit slower as well. So there's always disadvantages to those kind of things.
Blair Stevenson (03:01)
Yeah. And I guess the challenge is most contact centres are cost centres. And so, as you say, they tend to try to make the most of the resources that are available to them. So what was the outcome you wanted for replacing the old Excel based reporting?
Immanuel Joseph (03:19)
The outcome that we were looking for is to remove all of the manual workload that's being put in every day to produce these reports. So I think there's about three to four FTE (Full Time Equivalents), just engaged updating these Excel files every day.
Which means that you're actually taking away the skill set that could be used in providing more analytics, more value-driven reports, and they're being used to actually just update an Excel file every day.
And we wanted to bring a system in place that would actually empower the reporting team to also produce more value out of reporting. But also the Team Managers and the Team Leaders to be able to use data, to be empowered to make decisions on their own, so that they're not reliant on someone to provide them an Excel sheet every day to come up with outcomes and things like that.
So the system we wanted to build was to have a robust online kind of reporting solution where the data is available for people every day, rather than being produced by a team of people and sent through to them in an email or a network directory.
Blair Stevenson (04:27)
So you kind of want it live, people could just log into a dashboard, see the reporting straight away. So how'd you go about transitioning away from Excel?
Immanuel Joseph (04:39)
It was a long process. We started this in 2017, 2018. I think as with any kind of migration, you always have some kind of change management that you have to do.
First of all, we had to work with IT to identify what solution they could offer us from the company's point of view, so that we don't have to build a technology from scratch as well. So it's always important to have a good relationship with IT to understand what's offered by the business and make use of it.
So we identified that with IT that SQL server and SQL server reporting services were already offered as part of a BI platform through Allianz. But the contact centre was not using that because of the other issues like skillsets and things like that, that we mentioned before. So that was a first step, we had to work with IT to identify.
And then the biggest challenge was always going to be the change management within the business. Because people in leadership in the business have always expected some Excel file to be sent through to them every day.
Without having a system in place, getting that sign-off is always harder, so you've got to take them through the process of this, "So these are the biggest changes that will come about when we actually transition to this system."
And once we got that sign-off, and the people started visualising it a bit more saying, "Okay, so we can actually make the decisions ourselves by looking at this dashboard, rather than expecting someone to send us an Excel spreadsheet every day."
And the problem with the Excel spreadsheet is each day you could have a different logic worked out for the same KPI. So there's no robustness to the number that's being reported on, because there's no governance or control over it as well.
But with a dashboard, once you've moved to a dashboard, you can actually have a robust KPI setup and the documentation can be really clear on "This is exactly how the KPI is derived.' And it's not constantly changing every day as well.
Blair Stevenson (06:52)
Nice. So once contact centre leaders managed to get that new system, what was their reaction to it?
Immanuel Joseph (07:03)
I think initially, as with any change, there was a bit of hesitancy because they were not really receiving an email from the team, that they were actually going into this dashboard to view it for themselves, and there was a bit of hesitancy.
But I believe once they started utilising and seeing the difference it makes, and it also provides a lot of empowerment for them to come up with decisions themselves, that then they were hooked to that kind of reporting as to they wanted more and more reporting to be done through the new platform, rather than in Excel.
I had a very interesting conversation with some of them on this that Excel reporting takes less time to produce than a dashboard on SQL server reporting, but they were willing to wait for that longer duration for me to produce some SQL server reporting, just for the robustness and the ease of access.
So I think that that was definitely a mind shift towards how they wanted to see the reporting, once they saw the difference it makes in the management of the day-to-day leadership of their role.
Blair Stevenson (08:11)
Very cool. So where are you now with that reporting system?
Immanuel Joseph (08:15)
We started off with about 20 different Excel-based reports when we picked up this project. But now, there are around 150 different reports that we produce to the platform.
But I'm definitely not saying volume is the benefit. So in a contact centre world, there is a reason for the volume of reporting that we have because the different channels that come into the contact centre.
But the value that we see out of this is actually the framework that we we've set up is scalable to any number of reports. So what I mean by 'scalable', the time it takes to produce 150 reports or 10 reports is the same, because there's no real additional staff required in the reporting team to produce more reports, because your framework is set up to do all this stuff in an automated way.
So we are able to produce more and more reporting, and even to other business units, as we actually make progress in this area.
Blair Stevenson (09:21)
That's phenomenal. So there must have been a change in the skillset of your people, to move from inputting data into the Excel spreadsheet to actually building a system.
Immanuel Joseph (09:37)
Yeah, definitely. So we started this team off with the terminology for a role called 'reporting specialist'. So we had to migrate that into more of a reporting analyst or a data analyst kind of skillset in the team.
It doesn't mean that we had to go and hire new people. We've only done that for one role out of the four roles we had, but we could train internally to improve that skillset of the person who was a reporting specialist into a reporting analyst.
So it doesn't mean that you get to get rid of people entirely. We were like, it's always the case of the talent that you have in the business and how you can best make use of them by training them. Definitely there is a change in skillset, but it also comes along with some training that we provided internally.
Blair Stevenson (10:25)
Brilliant. If you were external to Allianz, why would someone like you with a master's degree in Information Technology with massive technical skills, why would someone like you be attracted to that operations environment?
Immanuel Joseph (10:49)
I think that is a really good question because people with a lot of technical background always seem to revolve around the IT kind of business units.
But the reason I think that IT people can make a lot of difference in the operational world is that they can solve problems quicker than anyone else. So they have the technical skillset to actually solve a problem, a complex problem, and provide simple solutions to a complex problem because of the technical knowledge, which actually brings in a lot of value-add and efficiency in the business.
So by automating this kind of solution, we would have saved the business a lot of money that would have been used in hiring more reporting specialists to provide the volume of reporting that we're providing. So I think in that respect, I always believe that technical people are required in the operations to solve complex problems using simple solutions.
Blair Stevenson (11:47)
Makes sense, which would be an exciting place to be. What would your advice be to contact centre leaders who are still using Excel spreadsheets for their reporting, but they want to take a better approach?
Immanuel Joseph (12:05)
I think there's nothing wrong with using Excel spreadsheets. I think Excel spreadsheets can be used in a better way as well. But you've got to be able to define what your better approach is.
What worked for us might not work for everyone or a different company. This is mainly is due to the different infrastructure, different company software.
So it's always good to work with IT to identify what they can offer from a technology point of view, and then arrive at some kind of baseline to say, "Okay, this is what IT can offer", and then bring in a skillset to use that technology to provide what you need and what you think is best for your business.
It doesn't mean that you need to get rid of Excel. Excel can be used in a more automated way. So the better approach could be that, "How do we simplify the way we use Excel and not put too much data into it", and things like that.
I think contact centres are very big on internal recruitment, which is great. But I think that sometimes it's easy to miss the right skillset that's needed for the role as part of that as well. So I believe that when recruiting for any reporting related function, it's always good to identify the need, and check if the candidate has the right skillset to do what the management wants them to do, and what they require from a reporting team as well.
Blair Stevenson (13:29)
Cool. That makes huge sense. Immanuel, thank you for sharing your journey, I really appreciate it. It's astonishing what you've been able to achieve over the last two or three years. Thank you.
Immanuel Joseph (13:43)
Thank you so much for the opportunity.
Blair Stevenson (13:48)
For listeners, you'll find a link to the show notes in the episode description below.
And if you'd like to connect with Immanuel on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/immanuel-joseph-a56b0468/), you'll also find the link to his LinkedIn profile in the description too.
And lastly, if you'd like to follow me on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevensonblair/), you'll find the link to my profile there as well.
Well, that's it from us. Have a productive week.