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Sometimes the differences between one data source and another can be a little confusing; Call Data Vs. Call Party Activity is no exception. When should you use one over the other? Because we always want to keep Brightmetrics reporting as intuitive and easy to use as possible, in this article we will illuminate some of the differences and some of the use cases for these two often obscure data sources.
Sometimes the differences between one data source and another can be a little confusing; Call Data Vs. Call Party Activity is no exception. When should you use one over the other? Because we always want to keep Brightmetrics reporting as intuitive and easy to use as possible, in this article we will illuminate some of the differences and some of the use cases for these two often obscure data sources.
- Call Data: this data source is great for reporting around call volumes and finding a variety of factors that concern calls in aggregate. The Call Data data source is used in the Call Detail Report and Call Summary Report.
- When to use: if what you want is the number of calls for a period of time for an organization or for a specific group
- Limitations: In the Mitel database design, the Call Data source only associates one party with the call, and it is always the last party added to the call.
- Example: If Mary answers a call, talks for 2 minutes, transfers the call to Jim who talks for 3 minutes and then transfers the call to Bob who talks for 5 minutes, the Call Data source will show Bob on the call for 10 minutes. That's fine if you want to know how many calls there were and how much overall talk time there was in a group of calls or people, but is inaccurate and problematic if you want to know that Mary, Jim, and Bob all participated on the call.
- Where it’s used: The Call Data data source is used on the report templates highlighted in yellow below. You can identify the data source used for a report by looking directly beneath the report name:
- Call Party Activity: this data source tracks everything that happens on the calls and reports on them individually.
- When to use: you want to report or visualize a dashboard around the productivity of individual users, you'll want to use the Call Party Activity data source.
- Limitations: If you attempt to summarize the activity and call volume of a group using this datasource, it would be inaccurate as it would repeat counts of call records for all parties involved. For the example above, Call Party Activity would show 3 calls (our 3 participants- Mary, Jim & Bob) even though there was actually only one call.
- Example: Following the example above, it would show that Mary had a 2 minute call, Jim had a 3 minute call, and Bob had a 5 minute call. This is a great way for me to see how busy Mary, Jim, and Bob were from just this 1 call record.
- Where it’s used: The Call Party Activity data source is used on the report templates highlighted in yellow below. You can identify the data source used for a report by looking directly beneath the report name:
These two data sources are also available when you click on New Detail Report or New Summary Report:
Brightmetrics Call Party Activity data source is a major change to how Mitel reporting is done. We love using Call Party Activity because:
- It gives us the perspectives we need to really understand what's going on with each of our individual team members.
- It gives us some really awesome management tools for encouraging, recognizing, and identifying training opportunities within our team.
- It has a variety of values and dimensions that you can be used to see detailed information. e.g. How calls got to any extension or party in the system (Prev Party Name) or where they went after any extension or party in the system (Next Party Name).
- It accurately traces each leg of each call and allows us to see not only call counts for each party but also what part of the calls each of them participated in. Note: this does, however, mean that the total calls reported would be counted for each call party on any single call.
For more information around Call Party Activity vs Call Data please see the link to our blog article here written by our development team, and our article on all data source instances:
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