---
title: Getting Started
excerpt: "Set up Expert Statistics, take your first steps, enable AI Features, and adopt the daily, weekly, and monthly best practices that call centre managers rely on."
order: 5
---

## Getting Started

### Initial setup

1. **Obtain access**: your CX-Engine contact or administrator provisions your account and confirms that your subscription is active.
2. **Connect your PBX**: register your phone system with Expert Statistics so call and agent data begins flowing into the analytics engine.
3. **Map your system**: confirm the mapping of extensions, queues, and DIDs so reports use the right names.
4. **Configure the essentials**: label your custom agent statuses, set pre-answer times for queues that play a greeting, and define the colour thresholds you want reports to highlight.
5. **Create resource groups**: group the users, queues, and numbers you report on most often so you can recall them in one click.

For the strongest first impression, connect your real data before your first serious review. Seeing your own missed-call rate and your own peak-hour pattern is far more compelling than any generic example.

### First steps

1. **Explore the dashboard** to get an overview of current performance.
2. **Review agent statistics** to understand your team's availability and coverage.
3. **Analyse queue performance** to spot immediate issues such as a high abandonment window.
4. **Set up scheduled reports** so key stakeholders receive summaries automatically.
5. **Try AI Chat** by asking a plain-language question such as which hours have the highest abandonment, then follow the link into the underlying report.

### Enabling AI Features

AI Features is activated per phone system. Once activated, the AI Dashboard, AI Chat, and AI Alerts pages appear in the portal, and you can configure alert thresholds and notification preferences in the AI alerts configuration tab. See [AI Features](/en/docs/expert-statistics/ai-features) for the full capability set.

## Best Practices for Call Centre Managers

### Daily management

1. **Morning review**: start the day by reviewing the previous day's performance.
2. **Real-time monitoring**: keep the live agent-monitoring page or a wallboard visible during business hours.
3. **Queue management**: watch queue performance and adjust staffing as demand shifts.
4. **Agent support**: use live status information to spot agents who may need help.

### Weekly analysis

1. **Performance review**: review the weekly report for each agent and queue.
2. **Trend identification**: look for movement in volume, answer rate, and abandonment.
3. **Team meetings**: bring the data into team discussions so conversations are grounded in facts.
4. **Goal setting**: set weekly targets based on historical performance.

### Monthly planning

1. **Comprehensive review**: use the twelve-month trend and period comparison to understand long-term patterns.
2. **Resource planning**: align staffing with real demand curves.
3. **Training planning**: use agent comparisons to target coaching where it will help most.
4. **Process improvement**: turn recurring patterns, such as a consistent lunch-hour gap, into concrete changes.

### Performance optimisation

1. **Identify top performers** and understand what makes them effective.
2. **Support struggling agents** with specific, data-backed feedback rather than general impressions.
3. **Optimise scheduling** using quarter-hourly and weekday analysis.
4. **Tune queues** using coverage analysis, pre-answer configuration, and consolidation views.

### Getting value from AI Features

1. **Let the AI watch for you**: configure AI alert thresholds so anomalies come to you instead of waiting for a report.
2. **Ask before you dig**: use AI Chat to locate the right view quickly, then jump into the detailed report through the follow-up links.
3. **Review the AI Dashboard regularly**: treat its recommendations and patterns as a prioritised to-do list for the day.

## Conclusion

Expert Statistics transforms the data your phone system already produces into something you can act on. Real-time dashboards show you the operation as it happens. Granular historical reports, at six levels of time granularity and across queues, extensions, DIDs, origins, and callers, let you understand exactly what happened and why. Automated reports and both rule-based and AI-driven alerts bring the important signals to you instead of making you hunt for them. And the AI Features layer answers questions in plain language, detects anomalies against a learned baseline, and points you straight to the underlying detail.

The result is a phone operation you can manage with facts rather than impressions: better coverage, faster answers, objective coaching, and macro visibility across the whole organisation. Start with the dashboard, connect your real data, schedule the reports your stakeholders need, and let the AI watch for the problems worth acting on.