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How to Create a Call Center Dashboard in Looker with AI

Cody Schneider•

A well-built call center dashboard turns messy data into clear insights, helping you track performance, coach your team, and improve customer satisfaction. Building one directly in a tool like Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) is a great way to visualize your most important metrics. This tutorial will guide you through the key metrics to track and provide a step-by-step guide to building your own dashboard, plus an AI-powered alternative to get it done faster.

Why Your Call Center Needs a Dashboard

Logging into different platforms to pull call logs, survey results, and agent schedules is a time sink. That fragmented process means by the time you've pieced the data together, it's already outdated. A centralized dashboard solves this problem by giving you a real-time, bird's-eye view of your entire operation.

The key benefits include:

  • Instant Performance Monitoring: See at a glance if you're hitting your service level targets, how quickly calls are being answered, and what your customer satisfaction scores look like right now, not last Tuesday.

  • Data-Driven Agent Coaching: Spot which agents are thriving and which might need help. Is an agent's Average Handle Time (AHT) high but their First Call Resolution (FCR) is excellent? That's a coaching opportunity, not necessarily a problem.

  • Trend Identification: Is call volume spiking at the same time every Wednesday? Is a new marketing campaign causing a surge in calls about a specific issue? A dashboard makes these patterns obvious, allowing you to adjust staffing and training proactively.

  • Improved Customer Experience: Everything ties back to this. By monitoring metrics like Call Abandonment Rate and CSAT, you can directly address the issues that lead to frustrated customers and improve retention.

Instead of running on gut feelings, a dashboard gives you the data to make objective, informed decisions that improve efficiency and service quality.

Key Metrics for Your Call Center Dashboard

The first step in building a useful dashboard is knowing what to measure. Bombarding yourself with dozens of metrics is counterproductive. Focus on a handful of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that align with your business goals. Here are some of the most critical ones, grouped by category.

Productivity & Efficiency Metrics

These metrics tell you how efficiently your team is handling their workload.

  • Average Handle Time (AHT): The average duration of a single transaction, from the moment a customer initiates the call to the end of any related post-call work. While a lower AHT is often good, it must be balanced with customer satisfaction to ensure agents aren't rushing and compromising quality.

  • First Call Resolution (FCR): The percentage of calls where the customer's issue is resolved on the first contact, requiring no follow-up. A high FCR is a strong indicator of both agent proficiency and excellent customer experience.

  • Agent Utilization Rate: The percentage of time agents spend on call-related activities (talk time, hold time, wrap-up time) versus their total logged-in time. This helps with workforce management and ensures you're staffed appropriately.

  • Calls Answered vs. Calls Offered: This simple ratio shows how many incoming calls your team is actually handling. It’s a foundational metric for understanding workload and capacity.

Quality & Customer Satisfaction Metrics

These KPIs measure the quality of service your team is delivering.

  • Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Typically measured via a post-call survey asking customers to rate their satisfaction on a scale (e.g., 1-5). It’s the most direct way to measure how customers feel about their interactions.

  • Call Abandonment Rate: The percentage of callers who hang up before connecting with an agent. A high rate often points to long wait times or issues with your IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system.

  • Service Level: A core call center metric. It's the percentage of calls answered within a specific timeframe. A common goal is "80/20," meaning 80% of calls are answered within 20 seconds.

  • Average Speed of Answer (ASA): The average time it takes for a call to be answered by an agent once it's in the queue. This is a major factor in customer frustration and the abandonment rate.

Building Your Dashboard in Looker Studio (Step-by-Step)

Once you’ve identified your KPIs, it’s time to build the dashboard. While Looker Studio is powerful, getting your data ready and creating the visualizations requires some manual effort. Here's a simplified walkthrough.

Step 1: Gather and Prepare Your Data

Looker Studio needs a clean, organized data source to pull from. Your call data likely lives in your call center software (e.g., Zendesk, Aircall, Talkdesk) and your CSAT scores might be in a separate survey tool. The easiest way to bring this together for Looker is by exporting it into a single, unified Google Sheet.

Create a Google Sheet with clear column headers like:

  • Date

  • Agent Name

  • Call ID

  • Talk Time (seconds)

  • Hold Time (seconds)

  • Wrap-Up Time (seconds)

  • Total Calls

  • First Call Resolution (TRUE/FALSE)

  • CSAT Score (1-5)

  • Abandoned (TRUE/FALSE)

Your process might involve manually downloading CSVs every day or week and pasting them into this master sheet.

Step 2: Connect Your Data Source to Looker Studio

With your data prepped, it's time to connect it to a new Looker Studio report.

  1. Go to lookerstudio.google.com and click "Create" -> "Report".

  2. You'll be prompted to add data. In the list of Google Connectors, select "Google Sheets".

  3. Authorize the connection, then find and select the spreadsheet you just created. Choose the specific worksheet and make sure options like "Use first row as headers" are checked.

  4. Click "Add" at the bottom right. You now have a blank canvas connected to your call center data.

Step 3: Add Headline KPIs with Scorecards

Scorecards are perfect for displaying your most important, high-level numbers.

  1. Go to "Insert" -> "Scorecard" in the top menu.

  2. Place a scorecard on your canvas. By default, it will show a record count.

  3. In the "Setup" panel on the right, drag the relevant metric from your "Available Fields" into the "Metric" box. For example, to create a CSAT scorecard, drag your "CSAT Score" field into the metric box.

  4. Change the aggregation type to "Average" to see the average score, not the sum.

  5. Repeat this process to create scorecards for Average Handle Time (you'll need to create a calculated field summing Talk, Hold, and Wrap-Up Time), Abandonment Rate, and FCR.

Step 4: Visualize Trends with Time Series Charts

You need to see how metrics change over time. That's what a time series chart is for.

  1. Select "Insert" -> "Time series chart".

  2. Resize it on your canvas.

  3. In the "Setup" panel, ensure the "Dimension" is set to your "Date" field.

  4. Drag the metric you want to track, like "Total Calls," into the "Metric" box.

  5. Now you can see your daily call volume as a line graph, instantly showing you spikes and lulls.

Step 5: Compare Agent Performance with a Table

A table is the best way to line up agents and compare their key metrics side-by-side.

  1. Go to "Insert" -> "Table".

  2. In the "Setup" panel's "Dimension" box, add "Agent Name."

  3. Now, drag multiple fields into the "Metric" section. Add things like:

    • Total Calls (Use Call ID and set aggregation to Count Distinct)

    • Average CSAT Score

    • Average Handle Time

  4. Resize the columns to create a clean, organized table that lets you see who your top performers are.

Step 6: Make Your Dashboard Interactive with Controls

A static dashboard isn't very helpful. Add controls so you can filter and investigate your data.

  1. Go to "Insert" -> "Date range control." Place this at the top of your dashboard. Now you can select any time period to analyze.

  2. Go to "Insert" -> "Drop-down list control." Place it next to your date control. Set the "Control field" to "Agent Name." Now you can filter the entire dashboard to see data for just one agent.

The AI Shortcut: Building Dashboards with Natural Language

The manual process in Looker is doable, but it has its challenges. It requires you to know how to structure your data, understand dimensions and metrics, and spend time clicking, dragging, and configuring each visualization. If a manager asks a surprise follow-up question, you have to go back in and manually adjust the charts and tables to find the answer.

This is where AI changes the game entirely. Modern AI-powered analytics tools eliminate the steep learning curve and manual setup. Instead of building charts click-by-click, you simply describe what you want to see in plain English.

The process is incredibly simple:

  1. Connect Your Data Sources: Integrate your call center software, CRM, and other tools with a few clicks. The AI platform handles the data pipelines and organization automatically.

  2. Ask for What You Want: Instead of opening a blank canvas, you open a chat interface and type a prompt. For example: "Make me a call center dashboard showing average handle time by agent, total calls answered vs. abandoned for the last 30 days, and a line chart of our weekly CSAT scores."

  3. Get an Instant Dashboard: The AI interprets your request, pulls the correct data from your connected sources, and generates a fully interactive, real-time dashboard in seconds.

This approach moves you from being a "reporter" to an analyst. You can ask follow-up questions like, "Which agent has the highest FCR this quarter?" or "Why did our call abandonment rate spike last Tuesday afternoon?" and get immediate answers. It democratizes data, allowing any team lead or manager - not just data specialists - to get the insights they need to do their jobs better.

Final Thoughts

A live, interactive call center dashboard provides the clarity needed to manage your team effectively and elevate the customer experience. Building one manually in Looker Studio is a great, cost-effective option if you have the time and technical comfort to clean data and configure charts.

We built Graphed to do all the heavy lifting for you. Simply connect your data sources, and you can create comprehensive, real-time dashboards by describing what you need in plain English - no technical skills required. It removes the hours spent on tedious reporting so you can focus on what the data is telling you and take action to grow your business.