First Call Resolution Article

I came across this article in Operations & Fulfillment section of Multichannel Merchant Magazine. As a major KPI for many call center clients, first call resolution is always being discussed during our management meetings. By investing time and energy into resolving callers issues on that first call, your clients will not only save money but greatly increase customer satisfaction.

The first step is to measure it. The article offers this calculation used by Seta Corp; "Total number of calls, less the calls requiring escalation = the number of calls answered on the first call.  Divide by total calls to get the percentage of calls resolved on the first call." The Q4 results for the company were "83,386 total calls less 5,818 calls that were escalated = 77,568 calls with first-call resolution. 77,568 divided by 83,386 = 93.02% first-call resolution."

The second point the article makes is the importance of defining what type of calls need to be escalated. By giving your call center reps the authority to deal with certain types calls this will increase first call resolution. For example, the article notes, "Give the first-line reps an appropriate level of authority to deal with customers. Our reps have been empowered to give the customer up to $25 in money back or $50 in merchandise just to resolve any customer situation/complaint."

For an outsourced center, this authority level will vary from client to client depending on their product/service offering and their level of comfortability. As a company using an outsourced vendor, talk with your account manager to decide on what is reasonable and review after a defined period with your results. You might be surprised that a small change up or down can really help drive your first call resolution statistics.

To read "First Call Should Do it All ", please visit:

http://multichannelmerchant.com/opsandfulfillment/advisor/first_call_0129/

- MK

Comments

[Ted Hopton]

First Call Resolution (FCR)is, as I titled a popular entry in my blog about it, a "Great Principle, Hard to Apply." If you're looking for more depth and detail about the issues of measuring FCR, I suggest you check it out.

[Ted Hopton]

Thought the link to the post would work with HTML in the comment, but since it did not, here is the link: http://yaichablog.com/2008/02/05/first-call-resolution-great-principle-hard-to-apply/