Mar 14, 2025Updated Oct 10, 2026

Webinar - Power BI Embedded in Action: The Call Center Use Case

ByPascal Kiefer

How can data analytics revolutionize call center operations? In March 2025, Pascal Kiefer, co-founder of Embedsy, hosted a webinar together with Rakesh Sookay, founder of BI Dashboards. This non-technical webinar highlights how Power BI enhances call center efficiency by solving key challenges, providing valuable insights, and optimizing operations. We also show how to use the Report in Power BI Embedded and dive into licensing, pricing, and security considerations. A key takeaway: Power BI Embedded works on any Microsoft Fabric Capacity, and external users don't need a Power BI Pro license — making it more accessible than ever!

Watch the recording of the webinar

What the webinar covers

The session runs in two halves. Rakesh Sookay shows a call center report built in Power BI Desktop, with row-level security that gives the CEO, each manager and each agent their own view of the same data. Pascal Kiefer then explains what Power BI Embedded is and what it needs, and shows the same report inside an embedded portal: own domain and branding, new roles and users, and no Power BI Pro licence for the people reading it.

Chapters

0:00 Introduction and agenda

2:18 About Embedsy

4:31 About BI Dashboards

7:05 The problem call centers have with their data

8:46 Demo: the call center report in Power BI Desktop

18:35 Power BI Embedded basics

27:42 The Power BI Embedded Playground

30:18 Demo: the same report in an embedded portal

39:49 Capacity, pricing and automatic pausing

44:13 Q&A

The problem: plenty of data, little clarity

After more than two decades in contact centers, Rakesh's diagnosis is that they rarely lack data. What they lack is clarity. Managers compile Excel reports by hand every day or week, full of numbers but short on insight, and every manager gets a copy that someone cut and pasted for them. (4:31)

The dashboard looks at a contact center from three angles: operational efficiency (service levels, call volumes, peaks), customer experience (above all, abandoned calls) and costs and revenue (call charges, and the sales lost when callers hang up). A well-run call center, as Rakesh puts it, means happier customers, better efficiency and more revenue.

Demo: one report, a different view for every role

The report runs on simulated data, for client privacy. (8:46)

Executive summary

Viewed as a manager, the first page shows only that manager's team: about 28,000 calls, the service level against target, call charges per call, average calls per agent as an early sign of burnout, and when the peaks fall across the AM and PM shifts. Red marks a cost going up or a service level going down, in IBCS style with Zebra BI visuals. Viewed without a role, the same page shows the whole center, about 131,000 calls.

Employees and hierarchy

A senior manager sees every manager with their team underneath. A manager sees only their own line manager and their own agents, with their site, the calls per department (tech, billing, sales) and the call charges for each. (12:36)

Abandoned calls, down to the agent

The last page tracks lost calls by month, by shift and by hour of the day. Viewed as an agent, the whole report narrows to that agent's own calls. The agent sees their dropped calls for the month, clicks a number, and the call opens in the telephony system, ready to call the customer back straight away instead of waiting for the numbers to be loaded into a dialer. (14:06)

Why this beats the Excel version

Everyone works from the same live report, and row-level security decides what each person sees. No one has to cut and paste a version for each manager, and nobody sees a team that isn't theirs. For how such roles are built, see our guide to row-level security in Power BI Embedded.

Power BI Embedded in plain words

Pascal's one-sentence definition: Power BI Embedded puts Power BI content (reports, dashboards, single visuals or paginated reports) into an application. That application can be a web app, a website or a mobile app; anything other than app.powerbi.com. (18:35)

What it needs

A capacity. Embedding works on a Power BI Embedded capacity, a paid Fabric capacity, a Fabric trial, and for now on Premium, which Microsoft is folding into Fabric. Even the smallest Fabric capacity, F2, runs it well.

No Pro licences for viewers. You pay Microsoft for the capacity, and the people reading the reports need no Power BI licence.

A service principal. One technical user, with at least the Member role on the workspace. However many people use the app, only this one identity talks to the Power BI service.

Two admin settings. The webinar uses the embed for your customers (app-owns-data) method, which a Fabric admin has to switch on first.

See the installation guides for the service principal and the Fabric admin settings.

How it works

The report side doesn't change at all. The report is built in Power BI Desktop as usual, roles included, and published to a workspace that sits on a capacity and that the service principal can access. Everything around the report is the application: plain web development. It calls the Power BI REST API, gets the report back, and shows it on its own pages, secured with Microsoft Entra sign-in and access tokens. (24:22)

Pascal shows this in the Power BI Embedded Playground, a Microsoft tool for learning to embed: a report loads through a few lines of JavaScript, and changing one setting (filters visible: false) hides the filter pane. The API offers many such options to shape how the report appears in the app. (27:42)

Demo: the same report in the Embedsy Portal

Pascal then opens the same call center report in the Embedsy Portal. The address is the company's own domain rather than app.powerbi.com, and the login page carries both companies' logos, to show that the look is entirely yours. (30:18)

Roles with their own branding and menu

As an admin, Pascal uses View As to see the portal through a role's eyes. The BI Dashboards role has its own branding and its own menu: the call center report, a paginated report agents shouldn't see, a call manual and some links.

Adding a role and users for call center agents

Pascal creates a Call Center Agent role: no export to PDF, access to the one report with the report's own hierarchy security RLS role, and the call manual, which is just a web page shown in an iframe and has nothing to do with Power BI. Then Pascal adds an agent by email address and gives them that role; the agent sets their own password. (34:09)

The agent was never added to a workspace and never given a Pro licence; Power BI doesn't even know they exist. The portal requests the report with the agent's identity, and dynamic RLS narrows everything to their own calls. A second agent with the same role sees only their own data, and neither can export.

Pausing the capacity when nobody is logged in

Fabric capacities come either pay-as-you-go (dearer per hour, but can be paused) or reserved (running around the clock at a discount of roughly 40%). Since analytics sits idle at night and at weekends, the portal starts the capacity when someone logs in and pauses it again when the last person logs out. For many companies, pay-as-you-go with automatic pausing cuts the cost a lot. (39:49) Today this is Smart Capacity.

Questions from the audience

(44:13)

Can users export, including paginated reports?

Yes. Paginated reports export to PDF and Excel; regular reports to the same formats as the Power BI service, such as PDF, PowerPoint and PNG.

How does row-level security work when embedding?

The roles are defined exactly as in regular Power BI. The application passes the role name (and the user's identity) in the API call, and Power BI applies the filter. Microsoft's documentation on Power BI Embedded security covers the details.

Do users need a Microsoft account?

No. Power BI doesn't know how someone logged in to the app; the app handles it. A portal can use email and password, Microsoft Entra sign-in, other social logins, or a combination, and can be set to allow only Microsoft sign-in.

Can different users see different reports?

Yes. In the Embedsy Portal, reports are given to roles and people are assigned to roles, as many as you need. See roles, pages and users.

Key takeaways

Most call centers don't need more data; they need one live report instead of hand-made spreadsheets.

Dynamic row-level security lets one report serve the CEO, every manager and every agent, each seeing only their part.

Power BI Embedded runs on any Fabric capacity, even F2, and the people viewing reports need no Pro licence.

The report itself doesn't change when you embed it; the application around it does the work.

Pausing a pay-as-you-go capacity when nobody is logged in can cut the bill substantially.

Want to see a portal like this on your own reports? Explore the demo portal or get in touch.

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