You have determined that first contact resolution is important to your contact center. Here's a guide to improve the metric and customer experience.
Contact center leaders have an abundance of metrics filling up their dashboards and spreadsheets. Speak with any leader and they can quickly provide you with their wish list of new metrics they either just started measuring, or want to measure. Topping that list is often first contact resolution (FCR). A commonly agreed-upon definition of FCR is as follows:
First Contact Resolution (FCR) is the percentage of customer interactions where the customer’s issue is resolved on their first contact with customer service.
If you are reading this eBook, it’s our assumption that you already know what FCR is and you may even be measuring it in some way, shape, or form. It’s important to acknowledge that measuring a metric simply for the sake of measurement is a waste of time.
If you are in fact measuring FCR, it’s time for action. There are specific levers contact centers and companies can pull to improve FCR — and in this eBook we will share some of those ideas. But first, a look at some of the dangers of an unhealthy relationship with FCR.
Emphasizing FCR in your contact center can be a wonderful sentiment. We can all get excited about the idea of taking better care of customers so they don’t have to contact support more than once. But what often happens in contact centers when a metric is emphasized — or overemphasized — is that leaders begin holding agents accountable for their performance on that metric without taking into account other complementary metrics.
Let’s look at a couple of negative behaviors that can result from an overemphasis on FCR.
Overemphasizing FCR in your contact center can lead to “cherry-picking” behavior among agents. Imagine a team working through an email queue and there’s one email sitting at the top of the queue that has been there longer than the rest and it’s clear that agents are avoiding it at all costs. Upon further investigation, you find that the email is several paragraphs long, stating three or four different issues.
Clearly, to resolve this issue there will be multiple replies back and forth. If agents are heavily judged by their FCR rate, what incentive do they have to try to tackle complex issues?
Can you blame agents for leaving the complex cases for some other poor, unsuspecting colleague and only working the cases they can resolve on the first contact?
When leaders fixate on customer survey results, tying them to agent performance reviews and compensation, is it any surprise that contact center agents ask questions like, “Would you rate the service I’ve given you today at a 10?” or “If you feel that I’ve resolved all of your issues, can you be sure to complete the survey you’re about to receive?”
Asking such questions requires a bit of finesse, and depending on the agent, it can come across as pushy or disingenuous. On the flip side, agents might choose not to mention surveys to customers when they don’t feel like they could completely resolve the issue.
Can you blame agents for asking, or not asking, customers for help if their FCR rate strongly influences any portion of their compensation?
There’s plenty of lip service paid to FCR by contact center leaders. Maybe it’s a metric tracked on a performance dashboard, or perhaps agents hear generic messages about the importance of “taking care of” or even “wowing” customers.
And when it comes down to it, “Unresolved contacts are a common source of customer dissatisfaction, and the organization tends to incur many additional expenses (repeat contacts, rework, etc.) when issues are not resolved fully,” states Brad Cleveland in Contact Center Management on Fast Forward.
In support of this, Dixon, Toman, and Delisi, in their book, The Effortless Experience found that, “96 percent of customers who had high-effort experience reported being disloyal, compared to only 9 percent of customers with low-effort experience who reported being disloyal.”
Clearly any business that wants to gain and keep customers, needs to care about FCR. And it’s time for contact centers to move past the talk and take action. Here’s a 5-step recipe for those who are serious and committed to improving FCR.
There are a variety of methods for tracking FCR. Some rely on customers to indicate if their issue was resolved via survey while others rely on agents to mark whether or not an issue was resolved as they wrap up interactions.
The most comprehensive method, however is to create a metric within your contact center platform to determine if there were any repeat contacts from customers about that same issue. From here, you can regularly track the percentage of interactions resolved on the first contact. But to improve it, go a step further and generate a list of all interactions that don’t fall within the FCR threshold.
Now that you have a list, it’s time to do the work of analyzing those issues that weren’t first contact resolved. Begin reviewing interactions, which will likely involve significant amounts of listening and/or reading. A contact center platform equipped with speech analytics can save significant time in pinpointing missed opportunities to resolve customer issues.
As you review, put on your detective hat and continuously ask this question:
“What could have been done differently on this interaction to resolve the customer’s issue on the first interaction?”
And for the contact center handling multiple channels, remember that each customer might contact you on multiple channels to get their issue resolved.
As you complete your analysis, your goal is to determine a root cause. Here are some key items to look for:
Look for occasions to train and/or coach agents to go the extra mile, anticipating all of the customer’s needs before the ending of the interaction.
Look for opportunities to empower agents to resolve issues on their own.
Look for product limitations and feature requests that customers are highlighting. This is important feedback when determining priorities for future product improvements.
Look for gaps in the customer journey where you can strategically give customers training or assistance to make it easier for them to do business with you.
As you spot these root causes, quantify the issues that happen most frequently. This will help you prioritize actions to see the greatest improvement to FCR.
As you coach and train your agents to first contact resolve issues, first explain why they should care about it. They need to understand what’s in it for them. Here are a few talking points for you as the contact center leader:
Resolving customer issues on the first contact means you, and your coworkers, will face less aggravated customers.
As FCR improves, our business will naturally gain and keep more customers. This is good for everyone.
I’m focused on helping you better anticipate customer needs and next steps in their journey without them explicitly asking.
I’m also here to help eliminate blockers that stand in the way of you doing a great job for the benefit of you and your customers.
Once contact center agents understand that a focus on FCR will make their job and life better, they will be more engaged and receptive to coaching efforts. But how will you ensure that coaching is consistent?
Adding FCR to your quality management process communicates both to supervisors and agents that it’s a goal for every customer interaction. Make sure that supervisors include this in any coaching conversation with agents, helping them understand where they perhaps could have taken further action or offered more information to resolve the customer’s issue. Also discuss how resolving issues in a single interaction impacts other outcomes like customer satisfaction.
Naturally, when you ask yourself what prevented an issue from being resolved on the first contact, you will discover instances where agents are not empowered or properly trained. The following actions and ideas will show your agents that you are focused on helping them improve FCR, taking responsibility for that which is out of their control.
Prioritize issues - Determine the top instances where agents aren’t empowered or trained to resolve the customer’s issue. Begin with the most frequent and/or the lowest hanging fruit for the quickest, biggest impact.
Eliminate bottlenecks - Are there processes in your organization with unnecessary bottlenecks? Like instances where one person pushes a button because that’s how it’s always been done. Unless there’s a compelling reason, enable more agents to push that button.
Refine processes - Perhaps agents cannot be empowered to push a button. Does the person who pushes the button understand the negative impact their delay causes? This is an opportunity for contact centers to find ways to work better with the other departments in the organization.
Identify best practices - Learn from the best practices of top performing agents. For example, perhaps one agent routinely informs customers of additional helpful information before concluding the interaction. Or may another agent has slightly longer handle times because she waits on the line with customers to ensure they receive those follow-up instructions sent by email. Build those best practices into training for the entire team.
Utilize microlearning - For some issues you may find that agents have the access, but need training. Set aside time during weekly team meetings or share quick, bite-sized lessons or videos with advice on how to best handle common issues. Be sure to test their knowledge.
Improve documentation - Much time is spent on knowledge management with the customer in mind. But don’t forget that a robust knowledge base is also a valuable internal reference for agents. Be sure that this is constantly being updated based on the common questions agents ask and encourage them to reference it often.
Integrate agent tools - Simple integrations like connecting your agent desktop to the CRM and pulling other valuable account and order information like shipping details can make it so much easier and more efficient for agents to support customers. Look for any integration to simplify the agent experience and that will translate to a simpler customer experience.
As you analyze cases that weren’t first contact resolved, follow up with customers. Given that high-effort experiences lead to disloyalty, this is about resolving the customer’s issue as quickly and completely as possible. Here’s an approach to follow:
Contact customers, preferably via phone or their channel of preference if communicated.
Communicate a sense of urgency around their issue.
Address and resolve whatever you can, immediately.
Listen to the customer’s perspective with an empathetic ear. You will gain valuable feedback about your product and service.
Take ownership. For issues you can’t resolve, sometimes a reassuring human who promises to take ownership and be a point of contact, will calm a customer enough to wait longer for a resolution.
Create long-term solutions. Sometimes band-aids work, but keep your focus on making improvements that improve the experience for all customers.
No, improving FCR is not for the faint of heart. It requires discipline, hard work, and an insatiable focus on customers. And don’t be surprised when you see other important contact center and business metrics improve along with FCR. Here are some examples:
Improved customer satisfaction
Improved Net Promoter Score
Reduced cost per contact
Reduced customer churn
Increased customer self-service
Improved agent quality scores
That’s just to name a few. It’s important to note also that average handle time, a metric many leaders aim to reduce may increase a bit as agents offer more complete solutions to customers. But with reduced repeat contacts, cumulative time spent with each customer will also improve.
Regardless, there’s no doubt that you will find this focus and effort around FCR well worth your while. Learn more about how 8x8 Contact Center can help improve the customer experience for your organization.