Enabling First Contact Resolution – the need for clearer definitions and consistent technology strategies

Read around the topic of First Call Resolution (FCR), and it’s clear that there’s a strong consensus that FCR is important, with analysts and commentators observing that: “first call resolution is the measure that matters most for operating an effective and efficient call centre”, “first call resolution has a major impact on operating costs and customer satisfaction”, and “first call resolution promotes more cost-effective customer interactions”.

So everyone seems to think that FCR is a good thing, but what do we actually mean by the term? This article aims to set a clearer definition, and highlight some fundamental areas that organisations can address to improve their FCR performance.

Earlier this year the CCA polled its members and asked them how FCR was actually defined within their own organisation. The answers were varied, ranging from ‘the resolution of an enquiry according to agreed processes without needing to transfer the call to any third party’ to ‘a situation in which the customer doesn’t have to make another call with the same query. Either the call is resolved then and there, or it has to be investigated further but the organisation calls the customer back’.

What the range of findings clearly showed is that there are some real inconsistencies in the definition and measurement of FCR, not least in what the term actually stands for – is it First Call Resolution or First Contact Resolution? What do we mean by this? How do we define resolution? What are we doing the measurement for, customers or management? And who does the measuring – should it be self-measurement or is it a task better carried out by the customer?

Firstly, it seems to make much more sense to measure ‘first contact’ rather than ‘first call’. Even though the telephone is still the main way for customers to interact with an organisation, additional channels such as email, webchat and Internet browsing/web collaboration are becoming increasingly popular and it’s important that all interactions are treated the same way.

Resolution is more complex, and largely depends on the nature of a caller’s enquiry. Some queries will always take more than one call or email due to their complexity, and there will always be some customers who will need more than one call to achieve the resolution they require. Effective resolution may actually differ for each call, and it’s the job of the organisation to set a realistic customer expectation for each call type.

Local authorities, for example, have potentially thousands of different call types. A standard enquiry regarding rubbish collection should always be resolved first time – ideally by an automated IVR service – and is a prime candidate for FCR. However, if the call is related to a more complex social services or environmental issue, the chances are that the first call is one in a series of calls, potentially spanning weeks or months.

So in setting First Contact Resolution targets, it’s worthwhile defining a clear scope of calls, otherwise those targets simply won’t get met. And in many instances, a rigorous adherence to an FCR philosophy can actually get in the way of an organisation’s service goals. Just because a call is handled quickly doesn’t mean that it has been handled effectively, and if the customer thinks their call is unresolved, they will almost certainly call back until it is sorted.

We should also ask why we want to adopt FCR as a measure. Organisations quite rightly want some of the acknowledged business benefits – reduced operating costs and improved customer satisfaction – that FCR is capable of delivering, and in an environment where traditional metrics such as call handling times are no longer seen as conducive to quality, FCR increasingly looks like a measurement that can help organisations meet both productivity and qualitative goals.

Who’s doing the measurement?

One of the most critical questions to answer is that of measurement. Given that FCR is all about resolving a customer’s enquiry first time, it doesn’t really make too much sense for organisations to rely on internal, self-reported effort-based statistics to measure their FCR performance. There’s every chance that such FCR metrics will become as devalued as traditional AHT (Average Handling Time) scores, and do little to impact the real customer satisfaction issues that the whole FCR concept was created to address. And when contact teams are rewarded on their FCR scores, it’s possible that self-reported metrics could be flawed. Benchmark research conducted recently by SQM, for example, found that internal FCR ratings were typically 20 per cent higher than FCR ratings that come from the customer.

If it’s simply higher FCR scores that you’re after, then organisations can take the easy route, measure only those calls that can be solved in the contact centre, limit the channels that are covered by FCR, and take all their measurements internally. However, while such an approach may lead to artificially high FCR performance metrics, it will do little to add value and improve long-term customer satisfaction.

So the key First Contact Resolution question that organisations really need to ask is “are we doing this to lower our contact centre costs, or is it a genuine initiative to improve customer satisfaction by trying to answer their queries the first time they get in touch?” Maybe it makes more sense to let our customers measure how we’re actually performing when it comes to First Contact Resolution.

Optimising First Contact Resolution performance

There is a quite legitimate argument that we’re all now focused on First Contact Resolution because we’ve now got the technologies in place that allow us to conduct effective FCR measurement and tracking. Being responsive is fine, but what if it’s a call that you can’t resolve quickly? What, for example, if a customer’s calling about a product that hasn’t been delivered and there’s actually a more complex underlying supply chain issue at the root cause of the problem?

The answer of course is that first-time contact resolution is never going to be easy if it’s done properly. There aren’t any technology silver bullets, no foolproof FCR processes, and there’s an increasing realisation that perhaps it shouldn’t be deployed as a standalone metric but used in conjunction with other customer-centric KPIs.

Establishing some First Contact Resolution basics

A basic Google search illustrates the FCR challenge from a technology perspective. The first few search pages come up with a wide range of technology solutions for your FCR problem – Service Resolution Management, Agent Scripting Software, Remote Desktop Control, IP Agent solutions, Benchmarking approaches, and unique Customer IDs to name but a few. No doubt each of these technologies could have some incremental FCR benefits, but at a component level they’re not going to address your real FCR requirements.

At Sabio we believe it’s important to find out what it is you’re trying to achieve before even starting to think about any technologies or processes that can help you to reach your goals. When it comes to First Contact Resolution, we think there are six key areas that organisations should focus on:

• Ensuring that customers have the flexibility and choice to deal with your organisation in the way or ways that works best for them
  
• Making it easy to resolve simple customer enquiries quickly, so that routine queries don’t slow down contact centre operations
  
• Having the right agents in the right place with the right skills to address the customer’s enquiry and making sure that the right person answers the phone
  
• Helping agents to access the information and giving them the training they need to resolve calls quickly
  
• Taking time out to listen to what customers are actually saying when they contact your organisation
  
• And making sure that it’s easy for customers to provide feedback on the service that they receive

Key areas of technology focus

There isn’t a simple technology fix that can address all of these areas, but there are a number of contact centre systems and applications that can be intelligently integrated and deployed to give organisations a better chance of resolving customer issues on the first interaction. We believe that businesses should aim to ensure that their services are personalised and consistent across the entire transaction irrespective of the channel, and have identified a number of technologies that can help address this:

• Workforce Optimisation – an integrated WFO approach is essential for effective First Contact Resolution. Interaction Recording and Quality Monitoring mean you can measure the leading and lagging indications that are important to FCR, identify non-adherence, and schedule relevant eLearning where necessary. Workforce Management and Performance Monitoring can help ensure that contact centres are staffed with the right number of correctly-skilled agents, while WFO also embraces two key emerging technologies – Speech Analysis and Customer Feedback – that provide a real time overview of performance from a customer perspective
• Speech Analysis – the latest phonetics-based and large vocabulary speech analytics tools now offer a cost-effective way to listen to every single customer call and pick out key words and phrases to identify unhappy customers who are likely to churn. By integrating speech analysis with WFO, organisations can now get these problem calls straight to the win-back team for immediate resolution
• Customer Feedback – by capturing the voice of the customer and using automated speech survey techniques to deliver real time feedback, organisations can quickly identify customers with problems and immediately alert retention teams to resolve the issue
• Streamlined Agent Desktops – composite, role-specific agent desktops can help agents access the information they need to handle calls quickly with a focus on the customer rather than the screens in front of them. It also gives way to more time spent training agents on resolving customer queries than using the different applications.
• Blended multi-channel support – to enable First Contact Resolution organisations need take advantage of the latest Customer Interaction Management systems that combine with a streamlined agent desktop to create a true single view of each customer. A multi-channel approach ensures consistency across channels and that contacts are prioritised and routed in the same way
• When coupled with Intelligent Call Routing, organisations can identify an interaction when it first comes in – whether it’s a voice call, an e-mail, a self-service transaction, a webchat or an SMS - and make sure that it is routed to an available agent with the right skillset
• Voice Self-Service – using the latest IVR and speech technologies along with a caller-focused design approach means that organisations can implement solutions that can resolve customer queries quickly and efficiently

Focusing on these technology areas will take you a lot of the way towards having a contact centre infrastructure that enables your organisation to deliver the kind of First Contact Resolution that really does improve customer satisfaction. Unfortunately these aren’t always easy solutions to implement, and their integration and deployment is often complex – but then so is First Contact Resolution – so getting it right can provide a valuable differentiator for your business.