There are a number of ways contact centers track first contact resolution. This eBook weighs the pros and cons, helping you track it the right way.
As a contact center leader, you’ve determined that first contact resolution (FCR) is a key performance indicator you want to track in your contact center. You're confident that resolving a customer's issue more efficiently is good for your customer experience and your business. Your definition also likely resembles this one:
First Contact Resolution (FCR) is the percentage of customer interactions where the customer’s issue is resolved in their first contact with customer service.
And while most definitions of FCR across the contact center industry resemble one another, you’ve also likely found that methods for measuring FCR vary widely. By our count, there are three common methods of measurement used somewhat inconsistently.
Recognizing that FCR is an important contact center metric, we will use this eBook to discuss each method in detail to help you determine how to best measure FCR in your organization. Let’s begin.
One way of measuring FCR is to ask customers if their issue was resolved in a survey following an interaction with customer service. Chances are, you’ve been asked this question and didn’t realize it. Here’s an example:
Contact center leaders tracking this metric might call it FCR — or they might refer to it as resolution rate, next issue avoidance, or some similar variation. Regardless of the name, they are working to measure and improve FCR.
Gain the customer’s perspective as to whether their issue was resolved or not.
Listen to the voice of the customer and gain opportunities to potentially save upset customers.
Gather immediate feedback about the service provided to the customer and gain an opportunity to quickly address complaints, preventing costly customer churn.
Post-interaction survey response rates tend to be low. A 30% return rate, considered successful by many, still means you aren’t hearing from 70% of customers.
Surveying customers immediately following the interaction might garner a better response rate, but it might also aggravate a customer who is still waiting for their issue to be resolved.
Survey fatigue is real. Nowadays, customers receive surveys from just about every company they do business with. A multi-question survey could rub salt in the wounds of an already upset customer — souring the relationship even further.
Customers don’t always know if their issue is resolved immediately following an interaction. Consider the customer who indicates that their issue was resolved, only to realize a week later the agent did something incorrectly.
When using the survey method to measure FCR, realize that there are potential issues when asking customers too soon. But there’s also a precipitous decline in response rate the longer you wait. Aim to strike the right balance when choosing timing your survey.
Have you ever been asked any of the following questions during an interaction with a company?
Is there anything else I can help you with today?
What else can I help you learn while I have you on the line?
Have I resolved all of your concerns on this call?
What else can I help you with?
Sure you have! Contact center leaders love to require that agents ask this question before an interaction is complete. This is a wonderful practice to give the customer every possible opportunity to address present and future concerns while they have the attention of someone who can help.
Problems occur when this line of questioning is used incorrectly. Consider the customer that is rambling on and on about an issue. The contact center agent, already long overdue for their lunch break, cuts the customer off. They ask, “Well is there anything else I can help you with?” just hoping the customer will say “no” so they can disconnect the call and head to the break room. Clearly, FCR is the last thing on the agent’s mind in this case.
Regardless of how this question is used, the disposition method requires that the contact center agent record whether the customer’s issue was resolved or not during their post-interaction wrap time. And this is a metric that can easily be tracked in a robust contact center platform. There are some pros and cons to this method.
Yield a higher response rate than the survey method because agents are required to complete this for every customer interaction.
This agent behavior can be tracked, coached, and enforced as needed.
Increasing agent after call work (ACW) actions means that agents spend more time unavailable for customers. Most contact centers are trying to reduce ACW time, not increase it.
Relying on the agent’s opinion following an interaction is too soon to accurately determine if the issue was resolved.
So many contact centers insincerely ask, “Is there anything else I can help you with” that customers either respond out of habit or it will have a negative effect on their perception of the company.
One way to improve the effectiveness of the disposition method is to check this during your routine quality assurance process. Instruct supervisors to do two things.
First, when reviewing customer interactions, check to make sure the agent properly indicated whether the contact was resolved and check to make sure the rating is accurate. Keep in mind that sometimes hindsight is 20/20.
Second, when supervisors discuss FCR in agent coaching sessions, ensure that they also discuss WHY resolving the customer’s issue is so important.
FCR can also be measured through analytics, yielding both the highest degree of accuracy and the largest sample size. But this requires two things.
First, you need to determine what FCR means to your organization, which is a business decision that requires significantly more detail than the definition we shared earlier in this eBook.
Second, you need to create a custom metric in your contact center platform or CRM to actually measure FCR based on the definition. Let’s dig into these steps a bit more.
We know that FCR is the percentage of customer interactions resolved on the first contact. While that may seem fairly cut and dry, there are multiple variables to consider when creating an organizational definition. Here are some variables to consider:
Determine a “callback threshold.” Put simply, after the initial contact with customer service, if the customer doesn’t call back within X number minutes, hours, or days, the interactions can be considered “first contact resolved.” You need to determine what that time threshold is and translate this to all of your digital customer service channels as well.
Take into consideration disposition or issue types. In some cases customers might contact your company again for a completely separate issue. You may want to use your disposition tracking and case handling to determine if they are contacting you back about the same issue or something completely separate and unrelated.
Look at all customer service channels. If your company offers customers multiple contact channels, it’s not unheard of that a customer might send an email or social media message and then attempt to follow up on a live channel like chat or phone. With the right CRM, you should be able to see all customer interactions regardless in one place regardless of channel.
Once you have FCR defined for your organization, be sure to write that definition down in a single source of truth so there’s never any confusion as to how it’s measured. Your definition might look something like this.
A customer interaction is considered first contact resolved if they only contact us once within a 48 hour period using the same contact, account or case information (name, phone number, email address, account number, case number, social media handles) and any associated contacts from our CRM. In the event of repeat contacts, we also determine if the selected disposition is the same, indicating contacting us about the same issue.
With that definition in hand, work with your contact center provider to create this metric for you. While you may find some providers that can track things like repeat calls or tickets with more than one response, it’s unlikely that any providers have an out of the box FCR metric that perfectly fits your definition. But they should be able to create this based on your criteria.
One last note on this method. Because FCR is a time-based metric where you’re waiting to see if the customer responds or calls back within 48 hours, it’s not real-time. If you’re looking for a real-time metric to gauge the real-time performance of your contact center, you may want to look at a combination of other metrics.
Finally, as you determine the method of measuring FCR that’s right for your organization, Brad Cleveland in Contact Center Management on Fast Forward sagely advises to, “Track FCR at least two ways — as an internal measure, and based on whether or not customers feel that their issues were resolved on the first contact (via survey feedback). If these measures don’t closely correlate, find out why.”
Dixon, Toman, and Delisi validate this advice in The Effortless Experience stating, “Companies regularly boast first contact resolution rates of 70-80 percent or even higher.” But then they go on to point out that, “Customers report, on average, that only 40 percent of their issues are resolved in the first contact.”
By asking customers to validate your internal FCR measure, you add balance to the metric. While both the disposition and analytics methods garner a larger dataset, surveys inject a much-needed customer perspective. This ensures that your perception of the quality of the customer’s experience remains aligned with the customer’s perception.
Interested in exploring these methods of measuring FCR further? It's time to take a deeper look at 8x8 Contact Center.