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Introduction
The Busy channels report allows you to break down each business day into half-hour periods, showing the maximum and average number of telephone lines in use in any particular half-hour. You can run the report for your entire organisation or for any entity within your organisation. You can even add filters e.g. to see how many channels were used answering calls to a specific number.
You can also opt to exclude weekends, when perhaps not many calls are being made or received, and so as not to distort the averages. You can also concentrate on incoming or outgoing calls or look at all calls.
This report is ideal when trying to determine if you have enough lines or indeed if you require more lines. Please note that if your call traffic tends to fluctuate throughout the year, you may want to run the report for a period that includes busy times before deciding to reduce lines!
This report is also ideal if you have a number of legacy switches throughout your organisation and are looking to replace with an IP solution which will allow you to streamline and save on redundant line costs.
Running the report
On the Reports screen, click on Busy channels in the reports type list, as shown below:
You can tailor the report to your specific requirements by selecting the entity you'd like to apply the report to as well as the output format required. You can also limit the results by adding filters and options as detailed below:
Entity
The Entity allows you to choose which area of the directory you would like to report on. If you want to run a report for your entire organisation, you do not need to choose an entity.
If you want to select a specific area for reporting, click on the
button to get a pop-up window showing the areas of the directory you can report on.
To drill up and down simply click on the hyperlinks provided, shown in the screenshot below as Aberdeen, Birmingham, Brighton, Cardiff etc.
Once you have reached the area you would like to report on, click on the green
as highlighted in red below.
Alternatively if you are looking for a specific area e.g. person,
department, site, name etc, you can just enter the name and press the
button as shown in the example below:
Select Entity
Once your entity you would like to report on had been selected, it will appear, as shown below:
Delete an Entity
In order to delete an entity, just select it with your mouse and click on the 
button above it, as shown below:
Understanding the Results
All reports can be exported in five different formats; Web, PDF, XML, CSV and Excel.
Output to Web
When selecting Web as the output format, the Busy channels report will appear as above.
The Web format allows for complete flexibility when viewing any report. To view details of any filters or selection parameters used in creating this report, simply click on About this report at the top right of the page.
All headers are clickable allowing you re-arrange the report layout in seconds. The headers of this report are as follows:
| Header | Description |
|---|---|
| Time slot | To sort by time slot, simply click on the Time slot header. On web reports all headers are clickable so you can alternate between ascending and descending order of time slot. |
| Total duration | The total duration is the sum of all time when lines were busy in the half-hour slot alongside. To sort and see which half-slot contained the longest duration of time when channels were busy, click on the Total duration header. |
| Max busy | To reorder the report to show the average number of busy lines per time slot, simply click on the Max busy header. The report will immediately re-arrange itself in descending order to show which time slots were busy on average. To see the least busy time-slots, simply click once again to re-arrange in ascending order of average busy. |
| Average busy | To reorder the report to show the average number of busy lines per time slot, simply click on the Average busy header. The report will immediately re-arrange itself in descending order to show which time slots were busy on average. To see the least busy time-slots, simply click once again to re-arrange in ascending order of average busy. |
If you would like to go back and view this report for a larger section of the organisation, simply click on the appropriate link in the breadcrumb as shown below:
Output to PDF
This report format appears as a three page PDF report. The first page shows the name of the person who has prepared/scheduled the report. This name is picked up from your login. It also contains the entity you report on, the period covered and any filters used in the report.
The second page has a graph depicting average and maximum number of channels used as shown below:
The third page breaks this graph down into detail showing the time slots with the maximum and average number of channels busy and the total duration of time spent on calls for each time slot depicted.
Output to XML
You can choose to output information as an XML feed for use in external applications. This may look a little odd when presented as shown below but is ideal when you need to provide a call logging feed to other applications.
Output to CSV
The CSV option allows you to output the data to a CSV file. This can be either opened immediately or saved for future use.
