The best call center dashboard software for real-time SLA tracking

Written by Plecto. Competitor details reflect each vendor's public positioning; check their sites for current plans and prices.

Call center dashboard software shows the numbers that decide whether you hit your SLA, such as service level, calls waiting, longest wait and abandon rate, while there is still time to add agents or change routing. It comes in two kinds: the dashboards built into your phone or contact center platform, and standalone tools that combine phone, helpdesk and CRM data. The right pick depends on where your data lives:

• Your platform's built-in dashboards (Talkdesk, Aircall, Five9, Genesys Cloud, NICE CXone) if you run on one of them and want the most detailed live view of that system's queues, agents and service level.
• Plecto if you want service level and queue KPIs from your phone system next to helpdesk tickets and CRM data, with targets, conditional colors, TV slideshows and agent leaderboards. It connects to 150+ systems, including Talkdesk, Aircall, Dixa and Zendesk Support.
• Geckoboard if you want a simple live KPI dashboard on a TV or in Slack for a small team.
• Zendesk Explore if the SLAs you track are helpdesk ticket targets, such as first reply time, and your team works in Zendesk.

Plecto is not a phone system, an ACD or a workforce management suite. It reads data from your phone system and helpdesk through integrations, so the phone system's own live view can be more granular for second-by-second queue states.

A call center service level agreement (SLA) is the standard your team commits to, for example "answer 80% of calls within 20 seconds". Service level is the metric that shows whether you are meeting it:

Service level (%) = calls answered within X seconds ÷ calls offered × 100

The most quoted target is "80/20": 80% of calls answered in under 20 seconds. Treat it as a starting point, not a rule. Pick a threshold that fits your customers and your staffing. Vendors also differ on what counts as "offered": Genesys Cloud, for example, lets you choose whether flowouts and abandoned calls are included in the calculation, so two tools can report different service levels for the same day. Check the definition before you compare numbers.

Service level is read together with a few related KPIs:

• Abandon rate (call abandonment rate): the share of callers who hang up before an agent answers, and how long they waited (average call abandon time).
• Answer rate (answered calls rate): how many calls your team picks up.
• Wait time (number of waiting calls): how many callers are in the queue right now, and how long the longest has waited.
• Average speed of answer: the average time callers wait before an agent picks up.

For a longer walkthrough of SLA metrics and targets, see our guide to service level agreements in call centers.

Built-in vs standalone dashboards. A dashboard built into a phone system only sees that system's data. That is ideal for live queue control. A standalone tool such as Plecto or Geckoboard adds data from other systems, so one screen can show service level next to ticket backlog, CSAT and sales calls, and you can apply the same targets and styling across teams that use different phone systems.

1. Plecto: call center dashboard software with live SLA tracking

Plecto is a performance management platform that turns call center and support data into real-time KPI dashboards, contests and coaching that motivate teams. For SLA work, it is the layer that puts service level, queue and ticket KPIs on one screen, with targets and colors that show at a glance whether you are on track. See the dedicated call center SLA dashboard page for examples.

• Best for: contact centers and support teams that use more than one system, and managers who want agents to see and react to service level, not only supervisors.
• Strengths: the Talkdesk integration streams real-time metrics and shows service level, wait time, abandon rate and agent status. Dixa streams every 10 seconds, including queues and service levels, and the Ringover and Puzzel dashboards show service level too. Aircall queue metrics (calls in queue, longest wait, employee status) refresh every 5 seconds. For a service level your phone system does not provide, you can build a custom formula that counts calls answered within your threshold and divides by all calls, the same count-and-divide pattern as the CSAT formula in the customer service KPI guide. Conditional colors turn a widget red, yellow or green against your target, and a notification can trigger when a formula result meets a condition you set, for example with a Slack or Microsoft Teams message or an email. Dashboards run on unlimited TVs at no extra cost, and every plan has unlimited dashboards and data sources.
• Limits: not an ACD, call router or workforce management tool. Live streaming covers a handful of systems; most other data sources update every two minutes or on a longer schedule, for example Ringover call logs every 5 minutes. Aircall's streaming metrics do not include service level, so it comes from call data through a formula. The 10-license minimum can cost more for very small teams, and it is not a heavy BI tool for deep ad-hoc analysis.
• Pricing: Medium from $24 and Large from $37.20 per license per month, billed yearly. Enterprise is custom. 14-day free trial, no credit card required. See pricing.
• More: contact center dashboards, call center dashboard examples and call center wallboard software compared.

2. Geckoboard: call center dashboard software for a simple live KPI screen

Geckoboard is KPI dashboard software that turns live data from business tools into dashboards for TVs, Slack, Microsoft Teams, email and mobile.

• Best for: small support or call teams that want a handful of live numbers on a TV with little setup.
• Strengths: its site says its support dashboards can make "queue health, SLA risk, workload, and agent activity visible in real time". It lists Zendesk and Aircall integrations among more than 90, plus an API and spreadsheet support for custom metrics, and an Alerts product.
• Limits: its Aircall data source page lists calls waiting, longest wait and wait times, but does not mention service level or SLA metrics, so you may need to calculate it yourself. Its product list shows no gamification, contests or coaching.
• Pricing: Essentials from $79 per month billed annually, with 2 dashboards, 1 editor and 1 screen; Performance from $319 per month billed annually, with 20 dashboards, 3 editors and 5 screens. 14-day free trial.
• Compare: Plecto vs Geckoboard

3. Talkdesk Live: built-in call center dashboard software with service level

Talkdesk is a cloud contact center platform, and its real-time dashboards show contact center health as it happens.

• Best for: contact centers on Talkdesk that want live service level, wait time and handle time for supervisors and agents.
• Strengths: its real-time dashboards page lists service level, average wait and handle time among the metrics monitored live. It describes fully customized dashboards you can share with other users, a wallboard mode for any screen, and custom alerts built on conditional rules. A separate Data APIs feature sends real-time and historical metrics to BI systems and CRMs.
• Limits: the dashboards cover Talkdesk data. Its real-time dashboards page does not mention SLA targets by name, so check how it handles your SLA definition.
• Pricing: see vendor.
• Plecto on top: if you also run other systems, Plecto's Talkdesk integration streams the same live metrics so you can put them next to non-Talkdesk KPIs, with leaderboards and TV slideshows.

4. Aircall Live Monitoring: SLA dashboards inside your phone system

Aircall is a cloud phone system with Live Monitoring built into the product.

• Best for: teams on Aircall that want to watch SLA and queue metrics inside the phone system.
• Strengths: its Live Monitoring page says you can monitor "SLA, customers waiting, or calls missed per number, user, or across your whole organization", and manage service levels and staffing from one interface. Managers can also coach calls live.
• Limits: it shows Aircall data only, and the page does not mention alerts, a wallboard or which plan includes it.
• Pricing: see vendor.
• Plecto on top: Plecto's Aircall integration refreshes calls in queue, longest waiting time and employee status every 5 seconds and combines them with CRM or helpdesk data, plus contests and notifications.

5. Five9: contact center dashboard software with SLA alerts

Five9 is a cloud contact center platform whose browser-based Supervisor Desktop gives supervisors a single metrics dashboard.

• Best for: Five9 contact centers that handle voice and digital channels and want supervisors to catch SLA problems early.
• Strengths: agent state by channel, calls in queue, wait times and campaign status in one view, and custom alerts that "quickly identify when certain SLAs or KPIs aren't being met", across channels.
• Limits: the Supervisor Desktop page does not use the term "service level" and does not describe a TV wallboard. It shows Five9 data only.
• Pricing: see vendor.
• Plecto on top: there is no ready-made Plecto integration for Five9 on the integrations list, so ask before planning around it.

6. Genesys Cloud: real-time queue dashboards with service level

Genesys Cloud is a contact center platform with real-time queue views and performance dashboards.

• Best for: Genesys supervisors who want a detailed, live view of each queue.
• Strengths: its Queues Activity Detail view shows a queue's current interactions, agents and service levels in one view and updates in real time. Real-time dashboards monitor "service level, average speed of answer, customer interactions, and wait times". It defines service level as the percentage of conversations answered within a defined time threshold.
• Limits: it shows Genesys data only, and service level calculations do not consider queue operating schedules. The dashboards page does not mention TV wallboards.
• Pricing: see vendor.

7. NICE CXone: call center dashboard software with TV wallboards

NICE CXone is a contact center platform with real-time dashboards and a wallboard feature for TVs and monitors.

• Best for: CXone contact centers that want floor-facing wallboards with performance statistics and leaderboards.
• Strengths: its help center describes wallboards as digital displays that show live updates, announcements, achievements, performance statistics and leaderboards on TVs or monitors.
• Limits: wallboards are only available with the CXone Performance Management (Native) Insights license. In its ACD dashboards help page, real-time widgets refresh every 5 seconds, but the help center excludes the Service Level and Skill Summary widgets from that automatic refresh, so check how often your service level figure updates.
• Pricing: see vendor.

8. Zendesk Explore: SLA dashboards for helpdesk tickets

Zendesk Explore is the reporting and analytics tool in Zendesk, and the one to look at when your SLAs are ticket targets rather than phone queues.

• Best for: support teams on Zendesk that track targets such as first reply time.
• Strengths: Zendesk's "Reviewing SLA performance" recipe builds a report of how many tickets met their SLA target in a given period, using first reply time as the example and adaptable to other SLA metrics.
• Limits: the recipe requires Explore Professional or Enterprise. It reports on Zendesk tickets, so it will not show phone queue service level from another phone system.
• Pricing: see vendor.
• Plecto on top: Plecto's Zendesk Support integration streams metrics such as live agent status every 10 seconds, imports tickets and ratings every 2 minutes, and the integration page shows how to build a live Zendesk wallboard on a TV next to phone KPIs.

Real-time SLA tracking depends on where the data comes from, so it helps to separate three situations:

• Live queue and service level in one phone system: Talkdesk real-time dashboards, Aircall Live Monitoring, Genesys Cloud queue views, Five9 Supervisor Desktop alerts and NICE CXone dashboards all read their own platform's data. This is the most detailed option for a supervisor watching one queue.
• Live SLA tracking across several systems: Plecto and Geckoboard sit on top of your systems. Plecto streams live metrics from Talkdesk, Aircall, Dixa, Puzzel and Zendesk Support, and imports other phone systems on a schedule of a few minutes. Geckoboard connects to systems such as Aircall and Zendesk.
• Ticket SLAs from a helpdesk: Zendesk Explore for SLA targets in Zendesk, or Plecto's helpdesk dashboards when you want ticket response and resolution times next to phone KPIs. See the guide to KPIs for customer service for response and resolution time formulas.

Ask every vendor two questions: how often does the service level figure refresh, and how does it define "calls offered"?

• A service level definition you control: the threshold (for example 20 seconds), and whether abandoned calls count, should match your SLA contract.
• Refresh speed: live streaming for queue metrics, and a stated refresh rate for service level, which some tools update more slowly than other widgets.
• Thresholds and alerts: colors that change when service level drops, and notifications through Slack, Microsoft Teams or email, so nobody has to stare at a screen.
• Your data sources: the dashboard has to read your exact phone system and helpdesk. Check the integrations list before you shortlist.
• Visibility for the floor: a TV wallboard and a mobile app so agents and team leads see the same number.
• Motivation: if agents influence service level through availability and handling time, gamification such as leaderboards and contests can make the target visible and fun.
• Price and rollout: some tools publish prices and start in days; contact center suites are quote-based.