7 Lessons Learned From Building Telemarketing Reports In Tableau

By Steve Small, Vice President of Information Services

Any telemarketing report is only as good as the reported data. You can create the most aesthetically appealing and sophisticated report that anyone has ever seen; however, if the data isn’t accurate, it’ll be useless.

At Telepromm, we pride ourselves on the accuracy and quality of the data we report. When our team and clients know they can trust their data, they are more likely to use it to guide them in making data driven decisions. We know that anything, but high quality and accurate data hinders our teams’ ability to deliver on our clients’ objectives. 

About two years ago, we decided to transition our reporting platform to Tableau. We liked the visual representation that Tableau offered and believed our telemarketing clients would appreciate knowing quickly how the team is performing. Given that we generate dozens of daily reports, we were also looking to improve our delivery time and overall efficiency of delivering the data. 

Our data team learned a lot in the migration process to say the very least. Now that we have been using Tableau for 20 months we know that the platform gives us everything we need to provide our clients and team data in a way that tells a story and is easy to understand using both numbers and visualizations.

Here are seven lessons that we have learned throughout our conversion to Tableau.

1. Tableau allows us to refresh the data in real-time. We have chosen to make extracts or snapshots of the data for displaying results for all our reports, which allows us to confirm that the information is correct before publishing a view of the data for our clients. Our clients will only see the previous day’s results once the data has been reviewed for any errors or inaccuracies.
2. There are many disparate data sources in telemarketing campaigns: customer lead records, call history records, phone and agent time data, IVR data, CRM data, etc. Tableau enables us to create either custom queries or drag and drop tables to access this data efficiently.   Why does this matter? Because it offers us flexibility when setting up data sources and in building relationships between these sources in our queries or establishing the relationships in the Tableau interface. For most reports, we use our queries, which gives us more flexibility. For instance, if we want a specific field to display all uppercase, this can easily be accomplished within a custom query.
3. To increase the efficiency of setting up reports for new telemarketing clients, we have created multiple report templates that enable us to set up and customize reports quickly. By standardizing the data fields and custom queries, we can quickly modify our template reports to display any client data.  With these templates, the time it takes to implement new reports has increased. The manual work involved in creating and maintaining reports has decreased, and so has the number of reporting errors. Once we implement our report templates and formulas, we rarely need to change them.
4. We use color-coded fields that make viewing data a breeze. We display green when goals are met or exceeded, yellow if the team is almost at goal, and red if below goal. Using color-coding, anyone reviewing the reports can quickly determine how the team is doing with their established goals.
5. Our data team can put automation in place where clients and team members will receive predetermined reports with a selected image or PDF file with set reports.
6. Tableau is designed for users to view and filter data on-line, and we’ve built our telemarketing reports in a way that allows users to view data on a granular level if they desire. Filters and built-in functionality to allow ‘slicing and dicing’ to summarize data in many different ways.
7. Users may want to see their data displayed differently. We’ve learned a lot since our Tableau migration began. Not just about the Tableau platform itself, but how to best organize data to provide a seamless user experience. More importantly, we believe we don’t have limits when it comes to reporting data. We have not had a client request yet, which we have not been able to fulfill. Our clients appreciate that we provide more information than what is requested to allowing everyone involved to make more informed decisions for their telemarketing strategies.

Without a doubt, we know that using Tableau makes it easier for our team, clients, and stakeholders to explore and manage data.

Steve Small is the Vice President of Information Services for Telepromm. Steve has an extensive background in all aspects of telemarketing and has an in-depth understanding of both the business and technical industry requirements. Steve’s 21+ years of programming and database design experience is instrumental in enabling an excellent client experience from data to reporting at Telepromm. Steve can be reached at [email protected] or at 516-656-5135.