What a KAM's day actually looks like — one timeline, not three reports

Ask a manager what their key account managers did yesterday and you usually get one of two answers. Either a number (“she made 40 calls”) with no shape to it, or a vague feeling built from whoever was loudest in standup. Neither helps you coach anyone.

The data usually exists. It is just spread across three places: the softphone’s call history, the call recordings, and the tasks, calls and meetings logged in the CRM. They overlap, too. One recorded call can show up as a dial, a recording and a call activity at once.

So we built the Daily Timeline in NerdCRM. It lives under Analytics → Daily Timeline and shows one person’s day, start to finish, on a single hour ruler.

One call, one event

When the recorder agent is running next to MicroSIP, NerdCRM gets two streams: every dial from MicroSIP’s call list, and the recording file for calls that were recorded. Recordings also create or link a call activity. Shown naively, one conversation would appear two or three times.

The timeline folds them together with a few plain rules:

• The dial log is the base. Every dial becomes a call event at the time it was placed.
• Each recording is pinned to the nearest unclaimed dial within five minutes. The file’s timestamp and the softphone’s log drift a little, and recordings are matched in time order so an earlier one can’t take a later call’s slot.
• A recording with no matching dial becomes its own event. The audio is proof the call happened. This is also how teams without the dial feed still get a timeline.
• A call activity within two minutes of a dial is folded into it, bringing along its title, notes, contact, company and deal. Recordings are deleted after 45 days, and this stops the leftover activity from showing up as a second call once the audio is gone.
• Everything else stands on its own as a separate event.

What deliberately does not merge: a call scheduled hours away from a real dial. Planned versus actual is something a manager wants to see, not noise to hide.

No invented durations

The timeline never makes up how long something took. A call gets a span only when a length was actually recorded. The dial log’s talk time wins, because it measures the call itself. If the dial log has the call but no length, the recording’s length fills in. If neither has one, the call is drawn as a tick at its start time.

Meetings and tasks are always points, because a CRM activity has a due time but no end time. A view a manager uses to judge someone’s day should not mix recorded fact with padding. When nothing on a day has a length, the page says so, so a row of ticks reads as “start times only” rather than looking broken.

The legend makes the rest visible at a glance. Unanswered calls are drawn hollow. Idle stretches longer than 25 minutes get a gap marker. Click any event to open its details, where you can play the recording if there is one.

Scheduled is not done

The most-read number on the page is Calls made, so it has to be honest. A call counts if there is any evidence it happened: a dial log row, a recording, or a duration. A call activity with none of those counts only if it is marked done, which covers a rep logging “number busy” or “switched off” by hand. Those show as Logged by hand.

An open call activity with nothing behind it is a plan, like “call back at 3pm”. It is drawn faint, labelled Scheduled, and the Calls made tile tells you how many scheduled calls were left out. Next to it you get Time on calls, the total of recorded talk time, plus the number of events and the longest gap.

Using it without micromanaging

A minute-by-minute view of someone’s day can easily turn into surveillance. We’d suggest a few habits instead:

• Look at the shape, not the minutes. A morning of short, unanswered dials followed by a long afternoon gap tells you something about the list or the schedule. It is not a reason to ask about a single 40-minute stretch.
• Bring it to the 1:1, not to the group. Like a KAM report, the timeline is for one-on-ones. Pull up a recent day together and ask what made it go well or badly.
• Let reps use it first. A KAM sees their own Daily Timeline. A conversation about a long gap goes better when they bring it up themselves.
• Compare plans with what happened. A day full of scheduled callbacks and few calls made is a planning problem worth talking about. It is not a performance verdict.

The ruler follows your organization’s working hours and stretches to fit anything outside them, so early starts and late calls stay on the chart.

The live demo has a sample workspace to explore. Call recording and the dial log are part of the $4 per user plan, and the free plan includes 100 recordings to try them. More on how recording works is on the call recording page.