First Call Resolution: Tips to Make Your Customer’s First Call Their Last

Keep these strategies in mind when your centre’s FCR rates are down in the dumps.

Of the many metrics that dominate the customer service world, First Call Resolution (FCR) may be king.

Consider the impact that FCR has on your contact centre. An FCR rate of 75 percent sounds high on paper, but that leaves 25 percent of customers needing multiple points of contact to achieve resolution. This means your centre is averaging 1.25 points of contact per issue. Over the thousands of calls your contact centre receives, the operating expenses and manpower dedicated to these extra points of contact add up quickly.

This doesn’t take into account the customer experience, either—nobody enjoys contacting customer service, and having to make contact more than once for a single issue can be the kiss of death in your contact centre operation. In fact, research by Nielsen McKinsey via HBR showed that more customers would recommend a brand that provided a fast but ineffective response (33 percent) over brands that offered a slow but effective solution (17 percent).

While it’s certainly possible to get the best of both worlds with a fast and effective solution, consider the impact of that statistic. More customers prioritize speed and efficiency over the slow-but-steady approach to problem solving. And what’s the best metric we have to track the efficiency of our customer touchpoints?

That’s right—FCR. So, how can your contact centre work toward improving this necessary metric?

Agent Training

One of the easiest ways to improve FCR is to make sure your agents are right for the job.

Your agents are on the front lines of your customer service. Never mind how optimized your procedures are, how many metrics you track, and how great your outreach is—if your agents can’t perform while on the call, you have no hope of achieving higher FCR rates. Data gathered by Bain & Co. via Salesforce showed that customers were 4 times as likely to purchase from a competitor when customer service problems were agent-related compared to price or product related issues.

To empower your agents to problem solve effectively, there are several things they’ll need:

• Information: Your agents must have all relevant customer information at the beginning of the call. Your data-gathering Customer Relationship Management systems must function correctly to meet this need. Information on past touchpoints, problems, and service experiences gives your agents the knowledge needed to efficiently move forward in the problem solving process.
• Soft Skills: Not everyone is cut out for customer service. The best agents will have the necessary “soft skills” that help them empathize and relate to the customers they’re working with. These skills are essential to customer satisfaction—knowing when to talk and when to listen can make all the difference when dealing with an unhappy customer.
• Simplicity: With so many screens, channels, and outreach options available in the modern contact centre, it’s easy for agents to get overwhelmed and sacrifice service quality for speed. Agent workload should be kept manageable to allow time to give each customer a personalized experience.

So, we’ve established that agent training is essential to high FCR rates. But what if your centre could get more problems resolved before your customers even pick up the phone?

Self-Service Support

In the information age, self-service options are all the rage. Technology empowers customers to find answers on their own before turning to live customer support. Data by Synthetix via MyCustomer showed that 90 percent of consumers will check a company website before e-mailing or picking up the phone.

However, when they can’t find a solution, they’ll still turn to the phones for more comprehensive help. This means that you’ll get fewer phone calls overall, but each problem will be more complex. This aligns with the goals we set for our agents above—fewer calls to allow each customer to receive a more satisfactory experience. Research by DestinationCRM found that 45 percent of businesses offering online self-service options had increased site traffic growth and fewer inquiries over the phone.

Self-service options in the form of FAQs, online tutorials, troubleshooting videos, and online forums can be excellent resources for customer problems. Make these materials easy to find on your site—you don’t want to frustrate your customers further by tempting them with self-help tools, only to make these tools impossible to locate.

Managing FCR

First Call Resolution is closely tied with customer satisfaction and contact centre efficiency. Low FCR rates indicate problems in your call centre infrastructure. Review the performance of your support team to ensure that they’re performing well, and take the burden off their shoulders by providing self-service and support options where appropriate. These two simple fixes can improve your customer service—and send your FCR to world class levels. Curious about more strategies for bringing up your FCR rates? Check out our free whitepaper!