First Call Resolution: Resolve Customer Problems in First Interaction
What does a business want the most? Exceptional customer experience! How can they do it? By improving the first call resolution aka FCR. FCR holds the power to yield countless benefits like reduced costs, smooth operation, high employee productivity, and a high retention rate.
REPORT: For every percentage increase in FCR rates, your business operation costs will decrease by 1%.
Your call center is the first line of defense against poor customer service. As you delve deeper into customer service efforts, you work on strategies and tools that increase client satisfaction and enhance agents’ efficiency.
In this article, we’ll cover how you can resolve a customer’s problem within the first interaction and no follow-up. You can provide them with the answers they need.
What is FCR?
First Call Resolution (FCR) or first contact resolution is a significant call center performance metric for monitoring customer service. It presents the company’s ability to handle and resolve customer queries via calls, emails, or other support channels in the first interaction. It gauges customer satisfaction and maintains a higher first-call resolution rate.
FCR matters a lot, be it a question, comment, or complaint in a single interaction. Following the recent report, about 86% of customers directly contact to call center and expect their issue to be resolved on the first call. For every follow-up call required to resolve the issue: the customer satisfaction rate drops by 15%. Additionally, every customer wants to feel valued and expects to take care of their problems seriously, thus increasing the importance of FCR.
Why is FCR Important?
FCR helps companies measure customer experience and provide insights to improve the company’s CX strategy. It is a good indicator, showing the responsiveness of the company and its operating efficiency. The crucial focal point of any business should be FCR – it strives to drive quality customer service. Why is FCR important for your business? Explore here:
STUDIES: As per SQM – FCR increases customer acceptance of a product or service offered via cross-selling by 20%.
Retaining Customers
Poor customer service is one of the reasons why customers change their business loyalties. Whereas, FCR strives to solve the customers’ pain points at the first customer interaction, increasing their trust. If at any stage, your customer is dissatisfied with your service; they might turn to your competitors.
Provides High Satisfaction
According to a report, 32% of customers will choose to leave your brand after one bad experience. And in the era of technology and social media, we’ll know unhappy customers sometimes vent their frustration online in public. Meanwhile, FCR turns potential brand detractors into brand promoters (by effectively solving their requests and queries).
STUDIES: Only 5% of call centers globally are currently operating with an FCR of 80% or higher.
Enhances Agent Productivity
Resolving customer queries during the first interaction means your support team has to deal with fewer follow-ups/repeat requests. This results in shorter wait times for customers and more time for support staff to spend on more complex requests.
STUDIES: 1% increase in the first contact resolution rate, which increases the employee satisfaction rate by up 5%.
Best Practices for First Call Resolution
Now, you know about FCR but don’t know its calculation? The formula is very simple – FCR = Total Resolved Cases/Total Number of Cases. You can see how your business stacks up to the average using this formula. FCR gives businesses room for improvement. Moreover, you can measure it by keeping these few parameters in mind:
- What is the reason behind the constitution of a repeat call? What is the reason behind the constitution of an escalated call?
- Do you count escalated calls against your FCR rate?
- Do you count the caller’s mistake?
- What factors will you use to determine whether a call was sufficiently resolved?
Once you’re clear with these parameters, you can start to implement FCR best practices. Some of the practices you can do are:
- Evaluating your company’s existing FCR strategy.
- Determining what needs to be improved.
- Developing goals that are achievable and address the deficiencies in the existing FCR strategy.
- Develop a plan to achieve these goals and implement them.
- Track key FCR performance indicators and measure the performance of the new strategy.
- Allow your agents to get resolution confirmation.
- Create CSAT/follow-up surveys to receive insights and customer feedback.
- Implement strong IVR and ACD systems.
- A higher level of customer self-service, a higher level of FCR.
- Strengthen and optimize internal resources/documents that have all the information needed.
Conclusion
The abovementioned practices will improve your FCR and also enable your business to provide exemplary and fast customer service. Here at Sarv, we specialize in helping call centers achieve dramatic surges in businesses’ first call resolution rates. With our integrated data solution, we provide call center agents with a 360-degree view of the customer and their demands.
You can gain access to information through multiple channels and learn to ask the right questions to customers, so your agents can achieve a first-call resolution much faster.
Want to improve your first contact resolution, then connect with us today.
What does a business want the most? Exceptional customer experience! How can they do it? By improving the first call resolution aka FCR. FCR holds the power to yield countless benefits like reduced costs, smooth operation, high employee productivity, and a high retention rate.
REPORT: For every percentage increase in FCR rates, your business operation costs will decrease by 1%.
Your call center is the first line of defense against poor customer service. As you delve deeper into customer service efforts, you work on strategies and tools that increase client satisfaction and enhance agents’ efficiency.
In this article, we’ll cover how you can resolve a customer’s problem within the first interaction and no follow-up. You can provide them with the answers they need.
What is FCR?
First Call Resolution (FCR) or first contact resolution is a significant call center performance metric for monitoring customer service. It presents the company’s ability to handle and resolve customer queries via calls, emails, or other support channels in the first interaction. It gauges customer satisfaction and maintains a higher first-call resolution rate.
FCR matters a lot, be it a question, comment, or complaint in a single interaction. Following the recent report, about 86% of customers directly contact to call center and expect their issue to be resolved on the first call. For every follow-up call required to resolve the issue: the customer satisfaction rate drops by 15%. Additionally, every customer wants to feel valued and expects to take care of their problems seriously, thus increasing the importance of FCR.
Why is FCR Important?
FCR helps companies measure customer experience and provide insights to improve the company’s CX strategy. It is a good indicator, showing the responsiveness of the company and its operating efficiency. The crucial focal point of any business should be FCR – it strives to drive quality customer service. Why is FCR important for your business? Explore here:
STUDIES: As per SQM – FCR increases customer acceptance of a product or service offered via cross-selling by 20%.
Retaining Customers
Poor customer service is one of the reasons why customers change their business loyalties. Whereas, FCR strives to solve the customers’ pain points at the first customer interaction, increasing their trust. If at any stage, your customer is dissatisfied with your service; they might turn to your competitors.
Provides High Satisfaction
According to a report, 32% of customers will choose to leave your brand after one bad experience. And in the era of technology and social media, we’ll know unhappy customers sometimes vent their frustration online in public. Meanwhile, FCR turns potential brand detractors into brand promoters (by effectively solving their requests and queries).
STUDIES: Only 5% of call centers globally are currently operating with an FCR of 80% or higher.
Enhances Agent Productivity
Resolving customer queries during the first interaction means your support team has to deal with fewer follow-ups/repeat requests. This results in shorter wait times for customers and more time for support staff to spend on more complex requests.
STUDIES: 1% increase in the first contact resolution rate, which increases the employee satisfaction rate by up 5%.
Best Practices for First Call Resolution
Now, you know about FCR but don’t know its calculation? The formula is very simple – FCR = Total Resolved Cases/Total Number of Cases. You can see how your business stacks up to the average using this formula. FCR gives businesses room for improvement. Moreover, you can measure it by keeping these few parameters in mind:
- What is the reason behind the constitution of a repeat call? What is the reason behind the constitution of an escalated call?
- Do you count escalated calls against your FCR rate?
- Do you count the caller’s mistake?
- What factors will you use to determine whether a call was sufficiently resolved?
Once you’re clear with these parameters, you can start to implement FCR best practices. Some of the practices you can do are:
- Evaluating your company’s existing FCR strategy.
- Determining what needs to be improved.
- Developing goals that are achievable and address the deficiencies in the existing FCR strategy.
- Develop a plan to achieve these goals and implement them.
- Track key FCR performance indicators and measure the performance of the new strategy.
- Allow your agents to get resolution confirmation.
- Create CSAT/follow-up surveys to receive insights and customer feedback.
- Implement strong IVR and ACD systems.
- A higher level of customer self-service, a higher level of FCR.
- Strengthen and optimize internal resources/documents that have all the information needed.
Conclusion
The abovementioned practices will improve your FCR and also enable your business to provide exemplary and fast customer service. Here at Sarv, we specialize in helping call centers achieve dramatic surges in businesses’ first call resolution rates. With our integrated data solution, we provide call center agents with a 360-degree view of the customer and their demands.
You can gain access to information through multiple channels and learn to ask the right questions to customers, so your agents can achieve a first-call resolution much faster.
