Measuring FCR Requires the Right Technology

Contact center industry analysts agree that FCR is the best way to measure the effectiveness of your contact center because it tells managers how well your employees handle customer service issues and requests the first time. There are a lot of first contact resolution solutions available today for contact centers, but no two are exactly alike. In order to properly measure and track FCR, it’s important that enterprises invest in the right technology. Here are several options that are available in the market today:

Post-Call Surveys

For most post-call surveys, only a small portion of calls are surveyed (about 5%) and only a small portion of those surveyed actually respond (about 20%). That means for every 500 calls a contact center may have in any given day, only 25 are contacted for post-call surveys and maybe 5 callers actually respond to the survey. Moreover, customers are more likely to respond to the survey only if they’ve had either a very good experience or a very bad one, skewing your FCR results.

Speech Analytics

In order to properly identify repeat calls, speech analytics tools scan a call for key phrases such as “I called the other day,” or “I called before.” Unless the caller uses one of these pre-set phrases, there is the possibility that the speech analytics won’t flag the call as a repeat, artificially inflating your FCR rate.  And since many contact centers only record between 10-30% of calls (and then store them for only 30-45 days), speech analytics may not always be able to provide realistic next-action steps. A FCR program should not only be used to measure FCR, but outline opportunities for improvement.

End-of-Call Questions

Many times a customer ends a call thinking their issue has been completely resolved only to realize later that it wasn’t or they have another question. For instance, a customer might call a insurance provider in order to add a new member to their policy, but then realizes a few hours later that they also needed to find a new primary care physician in their area. The caller didn’t realize they would encounter another issue that would require a call back, so end-of-call questions don’t always represent the true issue resolution rate.

Algorithm-Based Performance Management

Analytics-powered performance management is the only way to accurately and comprehensively identify repeat calls. Without it, your results can be misleading and useless in terms of using improving agent performance and FCR. Additionally, an algorithm provides a consistent method for assessing contact reasons across Web channels, IVR and agent-handled calls to truly determine repeat contacts. Only a systematic, algorithm-based approach to FCR can:

•  Tag every call as a repeat or not so there are no gaps in the data. Assigning a reason to every call helps identify repeats and determine which individual agents are struggling.
•  Track calls at both the agent and call reason level. Studies have shown that as much as 55% of call backs are due to agent error.
• Sequence the call events to determine the end-to-end customer experience. Linking the first call to the second (and so on) at the agent level shows you the customer’s experience and helps you find the real cause of the problem.

FCR is a key performance indicator for contact center. It’s difficult to measure accurately, but not impossible when using the right technology.