Increasing Call Center Effectiveness with First Call Resolution

Editor's Notes

• #2: Increasing Call Center Effectiveness with First Call Resolution
• #3: We’re here to talk about first call resolution today – a measurement that the Yankee Group recommends as measuring both the call center and the customer. It’s an important indicator for how well your call center is doing. So we’ll go over a simple definition of FCR – first call resolution - and how it may be affecting your business. And from this, we’re going to move on and look at some of the reasons to actually improve how well you handle calls. We’ll break down the 5 main causes of errors in really, just doing what you said you were going to do in the first place. And then we’re gonna look at measuring FCR – something I know a lot of you struggle with. And finally, the best for last – how can you actually start to improve what you’re doing and reap the benefits of a more effective organization.
• #4: So let’s start by looking at a definition for first call resolution.   Now there’s different ways to slice this definition. Ultimately what it comes down to is resolving the caller’s issues and meeting their expectations. For today, however, let’s keep it simple. And, from the internet, FCR is then defined as “properly addressing the customer’s need the first time they call, thereby eliminating the need for the customer to follow up with a second call”   And it’s surprising the number of call centers that aren’t doing a very good job at it.
• #5: In fact, numerous studies have shown that FCR rates on average, across all industries; across all call types, are only at about 70%.   So let’s be clear about this – with an FCR rate of 70%, that means that 15 percent of the time, you’re making mistakes and spending the other 15% of the time fixing things. So 15 cents of every dollar you spend in the call center is spent fixing things – it’s rework. And with that you put 15% of your customer base at risk. Now Given that the service you are providing from the call center –according to the Harvard Business review, the service you provide has 5 times the impact on your customer satisfaction than does the product or even your price. So making mistakes – avoidable mistakes – with 15% of your customers is not the best thing to do in business today – because customers today are too hard to come by.   But companies still do it! They focus on cost reduction and improving efficiency And it doesn’t look at the question of repeat calls or rework at all – it doesn’t account for the fact that those extra calls – they’re not only customers who you’ve upset – by not doing what you said you were going to do – but they’re also being escalated to supervisors and they’re longer as the customer has to repeat the history to everyone.
• #6: With call centers today focusing so much on the bottom line, it’s easy to see that if you can reduce your incoming calls by a certain amount, there is an associated cost savings because you’ve reduced your overall call volume. Reduce your volume, reduce your cost. And it’s this cost savings that everyone focuses on – it’s easy to see and can be easily assigned to the bottom line of the call center.   But there is a bigger impact here– and it has nothing to do with reducing calls – it’s reducing the customer attrition – it’s increase in customer satisfaction ,and increasing revenues.   Right - Reducing repeat calls – increasing First Call Resolution rates – that will increase customer satisfaction, it’s going to reduce customer attrition and churn. And it will increases revenues by 5 to 10 times the amount you’re looking at from the volume reduction savings. And its this impact – this revenue impact – that’s where the true impact of First Call Resolution is felt – in the ability to generate more revenues out of existing customers with less effort– and that’s the ‘effectiveness’ part – generating these increased revenues with less effort. Because you’re eliminating the repeat calls – the ones that add no value. They take value away. BUT – you still get to talk to the customer; you still get to show them how great your service is; that you back up your products, and that you can deliver. That’s being more effective.
• #7: So FCR – it’s got to be one of your key metrics for your business. Not just for the call center – but for the business. But there are a few others that are closely related okay?.   The SOLVE RATE that’s also important – it’s an agent metric as to what calls are finally solved by an agent – So regardless of how many times the customer called, who was the agent who finally killed it?   And another metric that is talked about is the cost per call. And That seems intuitive, basically your total call center spend divided by the total call volume. But it’s actually wrong to use as a key performance indicator. Because if you decrease your call volumes, your cost per call goes up. If you reduce your costs accordingly, then your cost per call stays the same. Remember – we’re talking about eliminating calls here right; cost per call is a measure of efficiency. What you should be measuring is your cost per incident. And what I mean by that is, is someone calls you back 6 times for a single reason that is considered on incident. So if you measure cost per incident, as your FCR rate increases, your number of calls goes down – but the average length per incident goes down – they get shorter – and cost per incident will go down. So it actually has a lot more value as a KPI than your cost per call.   And then the final KPI is your customer satisfaction – and that ideally should be measured by their willingness to recommend your company to somebody else – their net promoter score. And customer sat is directly related to your FCR rates, so you should see it going up along with your FCR rates.   And just a final note here – is that everybody is actively measuring your average handle times – and this is very often an agent-reward metric – and that’s actually counter to providing first call resolution. Right? If you’re measuring someone on handle times, then they are not thinking about meeting the customer’s needs – they’re trying to meet your internal metrics! I have a friend who works as a call center agent – and she’s the one whose consistently high in her customer sat scores, and it’s her quality recording that are used to illustrate ‘best behavior’ to the other agents. But she gets dinged all the time for high AHT. So – I’m not saying stop measuring AHT – I’m saying stop using it as an agent reward metric. Keep measuring it, you know, it is important. But do it in the back ground. And, by the way, you’ll generally find that it doesn’t change when you start implementing FCR improvements.
• #8: So improving your FCR rates will increase your effectiveness by reducing the multiple times people have to call you – reducing call volumes.   And it’s directly related to customer satisfaction, so improving FCR improves customer satisfaction and that reduces churn.   And measuring FCR will also allow you to properly measure and reward your agents. FCR is a statistic that they can’t really cheat – if an agent is solving a customer’s problem, they are doing what’s right for the business, and you reward them for that – right? You get the behavior you encourage.   And so ultimately, you’re going to increase revenue. Because you reduce churn and at the same time increase the growth rate of the entire company. Because you’re not losing customers And these are existing numbers that you can justify.   So If your business is there to provide customer service or product sales – well, improving FCR will allow you to improve your overall business processes – you will be able to find out where the warts are from this massive resource you have called your customer base – and then use that information to improve how you deliver your products or services.   And you can do this because you will gain insights into what your customers want – what are the things you are doing that they like and what are the things you’re doing that they don’t like – and can you improve what they like, and eliminate what you do that they don’t like. In short – you will learn to become more effective and efficient because you will be focusing on what the customer wants – good service; not average handle times. FCR measurement really becomes a weapon in your strategic arsenal that helps you grow your overall business.
• #9: But today, as I’ve said – a lot of call centers are making mistakes – I mean 70 percent You’re forcing people to call them back repeatedly. Why is that?   Well, there are 5 reasons that calls are not resolved right the first time. The first one is agent ability. The agent just, they simply didn’t have the training or the talent to resolve the call properly. And this would likely be addressed through identifying training gaps and correcting them. So – if an agent in your call center qualifies for a new skill and starts getting calls for it – FCR gives you THE metric for determining if they can put into practice what they tested for. Can they actually do the job to the same level as their peers?   The second cause of repeat calls is access to information. Agents can’t find what they need. You know, I called a call center once to find a document that I suspected was on their website – and the agent was very helpful and pleasant. I was put on hold a few times; I guarantee that the AHT on that call was way over the norm – but in the end she had to admit defeat. She said I can’t help you. Because she couldn’t find what I wanted and nobody else new what I was talking about. I know it was available, because it was one web page farther on from where I had stopped looking. So I found it, but they couldn’t find it. So as a management team, we need to make sure that the people answering the phones have the internal information and resources available to them – and I mean easily available – quickly available - to resolve these issues. Because People are going to take the pat h of least resistance, and if something is hard to find, they’re going to wing it – especially if they know it’s going to take 2 minutes to find and they’re being measured on Average Handle Times! So access to information is critical. And that goes hand in hand with cause number 3 of repeat calls which is–   Agent Authority. Does your agent have the knowledge, information, and authority to do what your callers need them to do? If the agent on the front line if they’re doing a job, there should be no reason that you can’t empower them with the authority to meet the needs of your callers – because you give them the training, or the systems, or the information they need to make the right decision for the business. I read a blog about this recently – the blogger obviously ended up at an outsourced, offshore call center, and the agent there could not help. But once the call got to the local internal call center, it was no problem – because the internal agent had the authority and the information they needed to allow them to make the decision in the first place.   The Business process itself is the fourth cause – um, and that is; the call center agent did everything right, but the letter didn’t get mailed or the credit didn’t get applied to the account, or the business didn’t empower the offshore call center with the tools they needed. And these are the hardest for the call center to affect generally, because it usually extends outside of their sphere of influence and into the rest of the business. But – assuming you can isolate and prove the issue in dollars and cents – this is of huge benefit to the business as a whole, because you can affect the core assumptions of the organization by what your customers are actually telling you about what’s going on   And finally, the fifth reason, we have the customer themselves. Sometimes, they just call you back. It might be the demographic; it might be the industry you’re in. But they call you again and again. Um There is something you can actually do about it – mostly, just recognize that they are calling you and handle them accordingly. So, you now, for example, if they call just to try to get a different answer, you know, I talked to Mom and I didn’t like what Mom said so I’m gonna talk to Dad. Well if the second agent has a history, and can see that the person just called in and talked to Mom, then the second agent can deal properly with the call.
• #10: So there are a lot of benefits to measuring and improving First call resolution rates and addressing these 5 core root causes. But a lot of companies still don’t do it. They don’t measure it.   And what are the reasons we hear typically – the main reason? Well, - a lot of companies simply don’t know how to measure it. It’s a call center right? It’s , based on standard telephony metrics like Average handle time or average speed of answer. So FCR measurement is a call center metric; it’s got to be phone thing, right? It’s determined in simple terms from the PBX. But FCR measurement; FCR is about the business, not just the call center. It’s tracking the transaction and understanding the customer’s experience and understanding the agent’s experience. And It’s this merging of these disparate views that people find complex to measure.   The other thing we find that in many cases, the true cost of FCR is not known to the business. I mean, if you can reduce call volumes, well that’s great, that goes clearly goes to the bottom line of the call center. But if you’re going to improve FCR, and your goal is reduce customer churn or improve satisfaction or increase revenues – you know, that 10 times factor– but it’s the revenues of the business –, there’s no What’s in it for me for the call center Because at the end of the day the credit won’t go to the call center – it’s going to go to the sales or marketing department. Unless you’ve got clear executive buy in sponsorship and are tracking it and looking for it.   I had one lady in a seminar ask me about an external business process – the call center told callers , uh, people would call in for a package, but the call center couldn’t tell them exactly when it was going to get delivered, right? So they had a ton of people who would call them back after a couple of weeks and say “well where’s the package”? And her problem was - she had no ‘clout’ over the group that actually sent the package – that they simply would not commit to a time frame for sending it. Well With proper FCR measurements, though, I explained that she could have put a specific dollar cost on those calls and she would provide the cost of these repeat calls to senior management. Say, you know, these guys not sending these packages, it’s costing me $5,000 dollars a month in repeat calls. Right? That’s going to make senior management sit up and take notice. And if it made sense, they’re going to make sure that the other department provided shipping time frames. AND –this is cool - they would have started to see some valuable, strategic information coming out of the call center. And feeding back to the rest of the business   So if we consider that FCR is a fundamental business strategy – something that can extend outside the call center – then we can start to understand its importance to the organization. And it becomes something that’s really really strategic in nature. Because everyone needs to understand that the call center is not an island in the business – it’s a business unit. It’s a core, critical delivery vehicle for service or sales to your customers.   But improving FCR - it is going to be a long term investment – there’s no quick fix. You won’t have that magic Monday morning where suddenly things are better, You’ll need to collect data. Over a time period You’ll need to analyze. And then act on that analysis to improve. And test – did we do it right – did we fix the problem? Did satisfaction go up? And then do it again. Collect more data. Analyze that. Go on to the next thing. Do it again and again And again. It’s an ongoing process because your business is changing, the market is changing; technology is changing; your customers are changing.   Okay so we have this multi dimensional measurement – that seems hard – but it’s not impossible to measure.
• #11: In fact there are 7 basic ways you can measure First Call Resolution – and while each of them will provide you with some valuable information, there are multiple ways of measuring this. And to really improve, you’re going to have to use a few of them. The more information you have, the easier it’s going to be in determining what the problem is and how do I fix the problem?   So none of these are going to give you an exact number, but when used in conjunction with each other, you can build a powerful and accurate view of how well your call center is performing.
• #12: But be careful when you are measuring FCR. There are a few things you can do that will make it wither on the vine. The first thing is – measure FCR to use it, not just to capture a number. FCR needs to be actionable, or it’s just an expensive data collection exercise. Secondly – use that same metric and your internal definition of FCR across all your call types and any other contact types as well. And third – and relating back to number one – make sure that you have the data you need to be able to do something with it.
• #13: So First, let’s cover off a couple of the more common stand alone methods, and then move on to create a measurement system that will allow you to collect actionable information you can use to reduce errors and reduce repeat calls.   The first way is just basic agent logging. This is easy to implement if you’re not doing it already – it’s as simple as a check sheet or an access database that the agent can fill in. When someone calls in, at the end of the call, the agent simply asks “Did I resolve your call today?” and fill in the check sheet accordingly, they put in the reason for the call. So it’s straightforward. And realize that this IS going to largely be the agent’s perception of the call, and it’s also a very manual process. The agent may not ask the questions So you get what you pay for. It’s quick and easy, but it’s not going to be accurate, and your agents will miss some calls because they forget to do it –potentially accidentally; potentially on purpose. But regardless, it will give you a measure of your FCR rate– it captures information that is timely and most importantly, its going to show the call center agents that management does have a specific focus on first call resolution. It’s going to raise awareness   Using Agent Logging to actually reduce your repeat calls is a little more difficult. The logging will give you a rough measurement and an idea of the size of the overall problem. And the management focus I mentioned will in itself help improve FCR. But for the most part, what you’re going to get in management is a bunch of impressions to work with – and by itself these are going to be hit and miss at best. But they’re going to give you something – you may find some obvious problems that you can work on.
• #14: The second way of measuring FCR is through Case management in your CRM system. And This involves using your existing CRM application; measuring tickets opened by agents whenever a customer calls. And If the same ticket is opened twice, then that might mean a call back. This method is complex though. Some of you are thinking, this is easy. And some of you are thinking, Oh my God! That’s another whole IT/ CRM project to do that. Right? And you’re both right. But if you’ve got a ticket based system, or one that captures customer history, AND you can actually get at the information you need in a coherent manner, to find out about repeat calls, then CRM Case Management will give you a First Call resolution measurement that has call reason information and will allow you to derive some root problem causes. But if you don’t, then it’s going to be a little more difficult.   Regardless, it’s still a manual system, and some of the calls just won’t be logged. I know I personally made 5 calls to one supplier and received an email opening and closing a trouble ticket only after my 5th call! CRM tracking falls down because it relies on the agents to enter everything into the CRM system – and especially again, if you’re measuring AHT, then some of the stuff just doesn’t go in.   I mean –the simple fact is – the number of calls that you receive, that you see ion your PBX, never matches the number of CRM tickets. Ever. But with this method, you’ve got yet another view on how things are working. And to improve, you can use the CRM reports – if you’ve got them, and then pinpoint some specific problem types to improve on. Again, the information you have will be variable depending on the capabilities of your CRM system. And, it may also be impacted if you have other, non CRM applications in the call center. If you’re using AS/400 it’s not capturing any of this information.
• #15: Next we have the survey group – these would be doing live surveys – which is the number three method, IVR Surveys, the number four method, and email surveys, the number five method.   All of these survey methods have the distinct advantage of giving you first hand customer information – the customer’s experience of what went on. Live call back surveys are often the most open ended, but going to be the most costly in the long run – remember the goal is here is continuous improvement for FCR. It’s going to be an ongoing cost forever. And another negative of a live survey is that they typically don’t happen right after the call, and then for some reason, people never seem to ask permission before they do it. So –first you should always ask permission to do a live survey – and secondly do it in a timely fashion. The longer you wait to do the survey, the more likely the customer is going to rate the business rather than the call center.   Live surveys, though, when they do capture actual call center information, they are going to provide useful feedback for improving specific issues that may arise. Often they’re going to identify specific training issues with agents if you know the agent that took the call. So they are gonna help improve first call resolution to a degree, but will lack the ability to help improve complex issues. They’ll get you so far but then you’re going to start hitting a wall.   Next, we have the IVR survey – now it has the advantage that it’s usually done right after the call so the Post Call IVR Survey. Now for some reason, everyone wants to make sure that the agent doesn’t know there’s a survey. You ask the caller in the IVR, you get permission, but then they don’t want the agent to know. But they still want the person to do the survey. Well that gets hard, – because at the end of the call, at most call centers, the agent says goodbye and then waits for the customer to hang up. Then you’ve got the customer on the other end of the line, wondering What’s happening now? I signed up for a survey … um…now what happens? I know this, because this actually happened to me two weeks ago – I called an airline and I always offer to do the survey. And so I talked to the agent, who did ask “Have I resolved your call”; and I said Yes, and I waited. There was some dead air. And the agent asked – uh, is there anything else? And I said no, and disconnected. So I have no idea what happened to the survey I was going to do. But – if the agent knows, then you’re using the survey to evaluate FCR, not to evaluate the agent’s performance – to identify process issues or training gaps , well for sure they’re going to be on best behavior – but you’re going to use this to improve first call resolution right – you’re not measuring your agent. And wouldn’t you want every customer to say yes to a survey so your agents are on their best behavior? And isn’t that what you want?   Now using IVR survey information to improve – well, on its own, if you just have an IVR survey, you won’t find out much more then a customer satisfaction rate and perhaps some recorded user comments. However, if you can include some CTI data with the call, then you can identify the customer, or the call type, – then you’ve got a little bit more to work on. You can start to use that information, again to identify process or training gaps, the specific, low hanging fruit and resolve that.   And then the third survey type - email – you it’s just not very engaging with the customer, and so you tend to get a fairly low response rate. And of course, since you’re doing an email survey after a phone call – you better have an email address in the first place   But all surveys give you some great information about the customer’s experience - as long as you keep a few important things in mind. First, always always always ask permission. People don’t like getting dumped into them cold. And if they say yes, they are more likely to fill out the survey. Surveying a customer who has not opted in will increase your costs, it’s going to lower your response rates, and ultimately it’s going to lower your customer satisfaction ratings. Second, keep the survey short – 5 questions max. and that means definitely not 6. Resist the pressure of marketing!   So, with surveys, you get a specific measurement of your customer satisfaction rating, which is very useful – in that it allows you to directly monitor the effects of changes that you make to your internal processes or training. And, since you’re using a sample here, so you will need to extrapolate trends based on the limited data that you collect from these surveys.. More typically, a survey will help you identify specific, unique problem areas and address them one by one. This will help you increase FCR, and then you’re going to hit a ceiling as you get into the more complex issues.  
• #16: Next we look at the sixth method - call and screen recording reviews. Recording is an incredibly powerful tool for helping you determine what the agent’s experience on an individual call was. And many of you can start tracking FCR today with this method.   If you are using QM today – doing random recordings of agents and then reviewing those calls against some type of evaluation form. You’ve got all the technology you need – you just need a bit of a twist. Well you can use that same system to do your FCR Monitoring. You can use the same recording. It’s similar but it’s subtly different. The most significant thing you’ll need to do is you’ll need to generate new evaluation forms, new evaluation processes, and train some supervisors to evaluate these recordings for first call resolution. Evaluation for FCR improvement looks to determine first the reason for the call, and then evaluate against the standard way of handling that call. Ideally you would be randomly sampling calls based on call reasons rather than on agent ID, but even with a random sampling of calls, you are going to pinpoint some specific problems, such as training gaps or areas where the agent could not handle the call for other reasons. This will help you determine another view of your FCR rates, and again give you some specific improvements you can implement.   Recording samples do provide you with an agent’s view of what happened on the call – but it’s limited by a couple of things. One, its limited by being a sample, and two, its limited because it will be the opinion of the person reviewing the call. You may not get the information you need to correct the problem, and specifically if you’re doing sampling, this is really going to frustrate you, then if you hear a call, you hear a reference to an original call, but then you don’t have that one recorded. So there’s a case here for full time recording.
• #17: And there is another, even more powerful use for call and screen recording in the call center, and that’s related to the seventh and final method – which repeat call tracking.   Repeat call tracking has the advantage of being completely automatic and covering 100% of your calls – it includes IVR transactions; it includes abandons. It doesn’t rely on someone’s impressions of the call. And It gives you the detail you need to specifically pinpoint problem areas. And, like all the measurements here, it’s not everything. It still relies on a business interpretation of what a repeat call is – within a given call horizon. And you need to have some way of identifying if it’s the same caller – through an account number or a known phone number. And finally, it’s a rear view mirror – right? That call that was resolved today as first call resolved, is suddenly tomorrow is not resolved because the customer calls back.   But repeat call tracking is a basis for helping get to the really complex issues in the call center. And if you’ve got a full time recording system – well, then you’ve got the ability to not only track a potential repeat call, but once you’ve identified it, you can then go back, based on the customer number, and listen to the exact first call, or the second, or the third. It lets you pinpoint specific issues based on complex patterns, and then you can fix that! The thing here - this is about the data. It’s about collecting the detail to help you figure out the problem.
• #18: So Capturing the details of the transaction – and that’s the basic requirement for measuring FCR if you want to make some serious improvements –if you want to get to that world class 85% FCR rate. It’s the basis of the FCR measurement triad – these are the three things that will give you the best bang for the buck.   you add on repeat call tracking – the technology view - and that lets you identify potential issues and pinpoint specific instances; then you use the call logging – the agent’s view - so you can verify what went on, and then finally the survey – the customers view to find out how you’re doing.   With these systems, you’ve got the ability to find out what is going on in the call center, why are things happening the way they are, and finally how do I fix it? This gives you the information detail you need to drive down into each specific issue – to identify the business process for the call type, and determine how best the call center should handle it, and how best the business should handle it.
• #19: So if you’ve got a specific repeat issue, you first need to know the call reason – that’s SO important! You know, I talk to people and they tell me their FCR rate, and usually they say, 75 70 percent, but no one ever says, well what kind of call? I mean, if someone’s calling your call center for your zip code you resolution rate better be pretty high! So anyway, you need to know the customer number – that not only helps you identify if it’s a repeat call, but it also lets you drill down to get the details – like listening to a call recording; then you’d want the Agent ID you know, it could be an agent issue – a training issue. It could be related to the time of day. Or you may find that as your ACD backs up, your FCR rates drop because the agents get stressed. So To evaluate the more complex issues in the call center, you’re going to have to collect and understand the details of exactly what’s going on with every single call. And collecting detailed information from every call will augment every type of FCR measurement you can implement in your call center. Your live callback survey isn’t any good if you can’t identify which agent took the call in the first place. Well, it’s a training issue, but we don’t know who to train…. Right? . Your email survey is dead on the vine if you can’t attach it to the email address.
• #20: For a simple example, let’s say you’ve noticed a really low customer satisfaction rating from your IVR surveys but only on a specific call type. What could that mean? Well, you evaluate the data, and you find there are a high number of calls that end in the IVR, which are followed later by calls into the call center from the same customer.   So you can intuit that you have some type of problem with the IVR. But what is it? Well, because you know the details of each call, you can go directly to the call recording of those subsequent calls to the agent   And listen to what the customer said. Based on that, you can quickly determine that for one specific type of call –potentially a subtype of some IVR script – the IVR is failing and people have to call you back as a result.
• #21: So if you’re going to improve FCR in the call center – well, the first thing you want to do is to start measuring. But ask yourself – if I measure this – what do I get out of it so that I can make things better? Because if you can’t answer that, don’t measure anything. Figure out how you can find that low hanging fruit. And then figure out the impact it’s having. There’s no sense fixing a $1000 dollar problem with a $5000 fix. And once you’ve identified what you’re trying to fix – figure out what the root cause is. Don’t fix the symptom – but do look at the 20% of things that are causing 80% of your problems.   And look beyond phone calls if you need to. I’ve talked really only about first call resolution, but first contact resolution is no different. If you’re dealing with multiple channels of communications, then consider them all – because an email followed by a phone call may still be a repeat call that is putting your customers at risk.   And lastly, use the information your collecting intelligently to help improve your business. Because unless you are an outsource call center, your business is more than just sales, or marketing, or engineering, or accounting, or the call center. It’s the sum of all of the above – and the information you collect from your customers will give you a strategic, competitive advantage that you can use.
• #22: So thanks for listening today. Hopefully you’ve taken away that FCR does have a large cost of doing nothing associated with it, and that you can get a lot back from improving it. And by eliminating repeat calls –doing more with less, you can really become more effective in your business. It’s a complex measurement, but you can measure it and most importantly you can improve things if you collect the right information. And finally – it’s not going to be a quick fix, but it will be a worthwhile one.
• #23: I’m Rob McDougall, President of Upstream Works Software – we focus on providing FCR solutions to call centers – with offerings like the our Business Interaction Management Suite, which helps you measure FCR multiple different ways out of the box.   We also address a wide range of call center solutions for call centers of all sizes.