Ensure that the customer is served quickly in the First Call Resolution with the contact center.
Without taking too long, the answer to the title of this blog post is as follows: because when solving customer problems right at the first contact with the contact center, two objectives will be achieved.
Good Experience
The first objective is to guarantee a good experience for your consumer. Your customer’s satisfaction is closely linked to the speed with which their demands are resolved. And that means saying that he expects all of this to happen right from his first interaction with the exchange. It is such a quality of service.
Think about yourself, your experience as a customer. When you have a question about a product or service and decide to contact the company, what do you expect? If you have to wait for a new contact or need to do another interaction, what is your assessment of that company? You can bet: that will be the same feeling as your client.
Cost Saving
The second objective is to reduce costs, another challenge for contact center managers. The equation is simple: the less often the consumer calls the contact center to resolve a demand, the lower its operating costs.
What is First Call Resolution (FCR), the metric of solving a problem in the first contact?
You probably have the Net Promoter Score (NPS) as one of the main KPIs for measuring contact center results. But another one that deserves your attention, and can help improve the service strategy, is First Call Resolution (FCR).
This KPI can be defined as follows: the division between the number of problems solved in the first contact with the contact center by the total number of interactions made in a given time interval.
A Service Quality Measurement Group (SQM) survey, a consumer experience management software company, shows that the average FCR in contact centers is 68%. This means that 32% of operating costs are spent on repeated contacts.
For your business, FCR is just as crucial as NPS because it directly impacts customer satisfaction and loyalty, which will be more willing to be receptive if your agent wants to sell a product or service during the interaction.
According to this SQM survey:
- Each 1% improvement in FCR improves customer satisfaction by 1%.
- Consumers who have problems solved are 10 times more likely to maintain a relationship with the company.
- The success of tying or direct selling is 20% higher when the consumer problem is solved.
