Real time dashboards focus on high-level awareness, immediate operational shifts, and technical health for live environments.
Operational use cases
Real-time dashboards can help you monitor the following operational use cases:
Intraday resource rebalancing. Analysts monitor the ratio of available agents to calls in queue to make immediate staffing adjustments.
Performance accountability. Managers filter by specific teams to ensure agents are in the correct status and adhering to their scheduled activities.
Service level preservation. Analysts identify queue spikes to proactively cancel offline activities like meetings or training.
Floor awareness. Wallboards provide a high-level, queue-focused view of health (SLA, number queuing, max wait time) to reduce agent stress.
Key metrics
The following are some key metrics to monitor with your real-time dashboards:
Total queued now. Represents the number of customers waiting in queue to be connected to an agent. High counts lead to SLA degradation and increased customer frustration and potential abandons.
Max queue wait time. The longest duration a customer has been waiting in the current queue. Serves as a primary stress indicator; rising wait times signal a need for immediate resource shifting.
Agent occupancy. The percentage of time agents spend on active interactions versus being available. Helps balance agent burnout against cost-efficiency.
Strategic investigation: Technical friction versus volume surges
You can use real-time dashboards—including prebuilt templates labeled "real-time" and custom dashboards that refresh in one minute or less—to investigate whether a performance drop is caused by technical friction or volume surges. Consider the following factors:
- IVR technical friction: If Total queued now (from Call Metrics (Live)) is rising at the same time as Failed sessions (from Call Session Metrics (Historical)), the issue is likely technical friction in the IVR, not just a surge in call volume. Create a custom dashboard displaying these metrics side-by-side to monitor this.
- Wait-time VA impact: If the wait-time VA is active, be aware that calls it handles are prioritized to the top of the queue and counted as Queue interactions rather than standard Queue entries. This distinction is important when analyzing queue metrics.
Best practices
Agent connectivity. If an agent appears missing, check the Agent Activity dashboard; the reason Agent put offline by system indicates a network failure.
Discrepancy in handled totals. Use Total queue answered instead of Total handled (both from Call Queue Metrics (Historical)) for reconciling queue-specific interactions.
Automatic sign-out. Use a dedicated service account for wallboards to prevent inactivity timeouts.