Workforce Management Featured Article
How Workforce Management Can Help Improve FCR
How often are customer issues resolved on the first call in your contact center? First call resolution (FCR) is often a topic of importance as the higher the number of calls resolved on the first contact, the lower the cost of care per customer. It also points to the use of effective strategies and proven workforce management.
Measuring FCR in today’s contact center is a little more complex than it was just a few years ago, however. In the days when the contact center was truly a call center, it was easy to determine the number of calls resolved on that first try. Now that the call center is generally a multi-channel contact center and interactions are often carried over between channels, the metric is much more difficult to capture.
For instance, the customer may start an interaction through a web chat, but find that they couldn’t resolve the issue through this channel and instead picked up the phone. While it may be the first call, it is not the customer’s first attempt to achieve a particular goal. If you measure the resolution from the phone call as an FCR, you’re not measuring accurately. And, while the customer may not know how you measure, they do know they have to contact you through two separate channels and that affects customer satisfaction.
If you’re not sure how much that satisfaction is influenced, consider a CFI Group study of customers who had issues that were not resolved in that first contact. The lower satisfaction experienced influenced 43 percent who said they would take their business somewhere else. Fortunately, you don’t have to try and make old processes fit in with new channels. An automated workforce management solution can not only help you improve FCR, but also encourage loyalty among the customer base.
Workforce management solutions make it easier to implement a schedule based on agent skills, allowing calls to be answered by those agents with the talent and experience to resolve the issue. It also allows supervisors and agents to use recorded calls in training and coaching sessions so agents are always focused on improvement. Quality monitoring efforts are also streamlined when calls are scored according to set criteria.
To truly drive improvements in FCR, however, the first step is in clearly defining what this means for your agents and your customers. Ensure your channels are integrated and staffed by skilled agents. In doing so, you’ll improve the experience overall, driving revenue opportunities and satisfaction in the process.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi