An essential part of any contact centre is metrics tracking. Excellent customer service particularly vital during a pandemic where most business-to-customer correspondence is done electronically. The challenge is that by attempting to monitor all potential call centre metrics, information overload will ensue.
Organizations must instead rely on metrics that contain the most detail. An essential parameter to monitor is First Call Resolution (FCR). Increasing first call resolution is important because it facilitates customer loyalty, improves service quality, and reduces overall service costs.
How the Pandemic Has Affected Customer Service
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The pandemic has resulted in a surge in call volumes at customer service centres worldwide and across sectors. Call volumes to contact centres that offer travel, and medical information have improved dramatically. In the early phases of the COVID-19 crisis, contact centres experienced a 300% rise in calls.
Contact centre KPIs were significantly impacted by the unexpected surge in call volumes. Most contact centres’ average handle time (AHT) has risen from 3-6 minutes to closer to 10 minutes. With longer queue times, the abandonment rate (AR) increased as well.
As a result, target abandonment rates are expected to increase from 2-5% to more than 10%. Longer average hold times are supposed to lead to higher transfer rates, a common cascading effect of longer average hold times. Considering these changes, it is more important than ever to institute first call resolution best practices.
How to Measure First Call Resolution
Top customer service companies use various calculation techniques to arrive at the most precise rate possible.
The following are some of the different FCR calculation methods:
Quality Monitoring
Internal quality control personnel must respond to the call and rate it as “resolved” or “unresolved”. The problem with this calculation approach is that it neglects to account for an essential factor: the customer’s view.
Just the consumer knows that their dilemma has been fixed absolutely. Internal QA personnel must make a judgment decision – essentially, an informed guess – to determine whether FCR has occurred.
Repeat-call Tracking Technology
When a client contacts the contact centre a second or subsequent time, this monitors to inquire about something they had previously discussed. Although this technology is beneficial, it isn’t the be-all and end-all of FCR calculation, so some consumers will not call back even though their problem hasn’t been resolved.
They might, for example, contact the centre via a separate platform (e.g., email, chat, social media) or, in the worst-case scenario, seek out a competitor.
Post-call Customer Surveys
These are performed immediately after a call through mediums like email. They inquire from the customer if the service representative fully resolved their issue. This is a practical, customer-centric FCR tool. However, depending exclusively on surveys would not give you the best report of your FCR.
For instance, a lot of consumers do not opt-in for post-call surveys. Another thing is that a caller will believe their problem has been entirely resolved during a call and say so on the survey, but the agent or someone else fails to complete the resolution, resulting in a callback.
How to Improve First Call Resolution In a Pandemic
Boost your overall consumer loyalty by using FCR.
Any metric you use in your reporting approach is only helpful if you can use it to boost your results. And this is the case for FCR. First, inside your help strategy, you should quantify FCR for specific channels to see which are the most effective. If your email support has a higher FCR than live chat, for example, it means that your team is more capable of delivering adequate and substantive resolutions across this medium. You will then apply this knowledge to the team’s configuration and concentrate on the most effective networks.
Commit to the long haul.
You must take the appropriate action to retain and enhance the call center’s capacity to handle customer concerns. The efficiency of the call is probably the most important parameter associated with FCR. Many businesses rate this in different ways, but the crucial thing to note is to prioritize consistency. Are the agents adhering to the proper procedures? What did they get right, and what did they get wrong?
Another vital metric to track is employee satisfaction. They are, after all, the ones who communicate with your customers daily. Are the employees enthused and motivated? What percentage of them go missing? What is the turnover rate of the company? If you respond to these, you will find ways to improve customer service.
FCR can aid in customer retention.
The repercussions of an unresolved consumer problem or concern are far too risky to neglect. 82% of consumers abandon a business due to inadequate service. Solving a consumer’s pressure point as quickly as possible, preferably the first time the customer shows concern — will be the difference between customer satisfaction and churn.