First Call Resolution

What is First Call Resolution?

First-call resolution (FCR) is a crucial contact center metric that highlights the contact center’s ability in terms of resolving customer issues, needs, or questions on the first call itself, i.e. without any follow-ups. Being an important element of customer relationship management (CRM), FCR helps to effectively gauge customer satisfaction and drive customer loyalty. It also plays a pivotal role in measuring your agents’ efficiency and contributes to the overall profitability of your contact center. Most of the contact centers aim for a higher FCR rate along with low talk time (the average time spent by agents over a call).

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Why is First Call Resolution important?

In today’s time, taking care of customer needs quickly has become imperative for brands. In fact, two-thirds of customers find it frustrating to repeat their issues to multiple support representatives. That’s where the need for First Call Resolution arises. According to The Ascent Group, measuring FCR for a year can help organizations improve their performance by up to 30%. Here’ what makes First Call Resolution the king of all call center metrics and why you should focus on it:

Improved Customer Retention

One of the most common reasons why customers leave a company is poor service and unresolved complaints are the biggest customer pain point. Focusing on FCR can help companies resolve customer issues quickly, thereby retaining them with ease.

Reduced Contact Center Costs

Acquiring a new customer costs five times more as compared to retaining an existing one. By leveraging first call resolution, you can provide best-in-class service to your existing customers, thereby decreasing the internal costs of your contact center.

Improved Customer Satisfaction

As dissatisfied customers are likely to share their negative experiences with up to 15 other people, it’s necessary to make every customer interaction as positive as possible. FCR lets you address customer concerns rapidly and helps you transform unhappy customers into satisfied ones.

Enhanced Call Center Efficiency

By effectively solving customers’ issues the first time they get in touch with your brand, FCR minimizes the need for repeat calls to solve the same problem. This makes your agents deal with fewer calls and emails, resulting in better contact center efficiency.

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How to measure First Call Resolution Rate?

To determine the first call resolution rate, you need to calculate the number of customers whose problems were resolved on their first call and then divide it by the total number of customer first calls at the contact center.

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Improving First Call Resolution the right way

Start by setting program goals

The key to improving the first-call resolution rate is by defining achievable goals and desired outcomes for your contact center.

Training your agents is essential

Once you’ve set up the goals, it’s important to focus on agent training for achieving improved FCR. Voxco empowers you with best-in-class agent training solutions for boosting your contact center’s productivity.

Tracking performance across multiple channels

To ensure an improved FCR, it’s important to continuously track agents’ performance across all channels. Be it a phone call or chat or email, Voxco’s robust omnichannel platform lets you effectively measure performance across all channels.

Offering agent incentive plans

By offering specialized plans for incentivizing agents, you can encourage them to work harder and try their best to resolve customer issues on the first call.

What are the best practices for First Call Resolution?

Consider the bigger picture

Always keep in mind that customers don’t just get in touch with you over calls. They’re rather available across multiple channels like email, chat, social media, etc. By defining your FCR goals across every channel and assigning proficient agents accordingly, you can improve FCR in each of those channels.

Leverage analytics to gain insights

With effective analytics in place, it becomes easy to gain immediate and actionable insights into customer-agent communications. This helps to significantly improve the FCR rate.

Always collect customer feedback

Gaining feedback from customers is not only essential for improving agents’ performance but also helps to boost the customer experience, thereby improving FCR. You must solicit customer opinions through surveys, social media, etc., and leverage that data for improving your company’s policies.

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Uncovering the tips for improving First Call Resolution

Identify the reasons for the delayed resolution

There are cases where reaching a resolution on the first call is not possible. For example, an outage in a particular phone company. In such a case, scheduling a technician will require a couple of calls too. After being identified as common, such issues can be alleviated easily. Also, the phone company can adopt a call-back system for alerting customers after the issue gets resolved.

Segregate common issues

After identifying the common issues, it’s important to segment calls that would require multiple calls for achieving resolution. By creating dedicated processes and hiring a special team for these issues will help to improve your overall customer satisfaction.

Minimize effort on the customers’ end

Always prioritize minimizing the burden from customers’ shoulders for resolving an issue. While there are certain necessary steps like call routing, you should include extra steps only if reduces the overall call time.

Don’t forget to measure FCR performance

Measurement is extremely crucial for improving your First Contact Resolution as it’s impossible to improve something without effectively tracking it. By leveraging dedicated software and keeping an eye on the metrics, you can collect insightful first call resolution data. This helps you to set better goals, improve agent training, and highlight the issues in your contact center.

Try to avoid transfers

Transferring calls between different agents or departments can give rise to various issues. For instance, some customers may hang up in between, assigning callers to the wrong department, etc. This can lead to a massive decrease in customer satisfaction, deteriorating the FCR rates.

How Voxco can help to make the most of your First Call Resolution?

Omnichannel approach

Nowadays, customers usually embark on a journey with a brand over one channel and keep switching channels in between. While this switch can happen at any stage of their journey, so it’s essential to reach out to them and resolve their issue over the channel they’re more active with. By investing in a robust, omnichannel platform like Voxco (that is capable of catering to customers equally across multiple channels), it becomes easy to resolve their issues on the first attempt.

Insightful dashboards and analytics

Voxco comes equipped with powerful dashboards and analytics that empower contact centers to understand key drivers behind customers’ issues. By seamlessly syncing data across channels like CATI, IVR, & cloud-based dialers, Voxco’s dashboards make it easy to gather customer feedback and resolve their problems on the go.

Secure & Flexible Hosting

Gathering data from customers and understanding their issues is extremely crucial. A respondent will share his/her issues only if they feel their data secure on your contact center. Voxco’s IVR software offers flexible hosting options that let you store the data of your contact center securely in the cloud or on-premises (i.e. with their excellent IT infrastructure.)

First Call Resolution: FAQs

How do I improve my first call resolution?

Create an in-depth and insightful knowledge base.
Ensure minimal customer effort.
Gain an effective understanding of the issue.
Always be clear and precise
Anticipate your customer requirements.
Answer your customer queries.
Provide effective training to the agents.

Why is First Call Resolution necessary?

FCR enables you to gain effective insights into customers’ perceptions about your brand. You can check if you’re able to resolve their concerns or causing frustrations to them. Being a critical call center metrics, improving FCR can help to reduce operational costs and boost sales.

What is the resolution time?

Resolution time is the average amount of time that a customer support representative takes for resolving a customer issue, case, or ticket once it gets opened. It is also referred to as mean time to resolution (MTTR) or time to resolution.