Last week a company asked me how much more first contact resolution (FCR) improvement it has left. The company knows its FCR rates—the ability to resolve an issue on a single contact—aren’t perfect, but at 84%, it finds it increasingly difficult to move the dial.
As I shared some of our benchmarks, I couldn’t help but comment how inflated some of the figures are—95% and above in some industries in the phone channel, and even higher rates in the e-mail channel.
This wide benchmark variance results from highly diverse definitions and measurements of issue resolution, most of which are not terribly accurate or beneficial.
Most FCR metrics have a vital flaw–they track assumed issue resolution. Customers typically believe that upon interacting with the service organization, the issue has been resolved. And so asking the customer via a survey or frontline rep, “Was your issue resolved?”, as conventional wisdom dictates, inevitably leads to a “yes.” Yet unbeknownst to the customer, he may have to call back for a related issue or obtain clarification.
Is there a better way? CCC likes the idea of using a metric that tracks actual issue resolution and accounts for downstream issues and requests for additional clarification. We call this Next Issue Avoidance, or going an extra step beyond addressing the customer’s stated question and “forward resolving” their next likely issue. And because simply asking customers cannot surface this information—the customer doesn’t know what the customer doesn’t know—we believe companies must use internally-derived FCR metrics to surface accurate FCR benchmarks:
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CCC’s vote? There is no “silver bullet” but we think callback tracking is the most accurate as this method captures any related downstream issues that occur over a particular period of time. If your company doesn’t have the technology in place to do this, even asking “Is this the first time you’ve called within the last two weeks?” can help you approximate your true FCR rate.
Some of the most progressive companies we work with track FCR in this fashion and score it at the frontline staff level. They tell us two clear findings:
1. The better reps have drastically lower callback rates as these reps actively forward resolve issues.
2. Fairness is not absolute–of course reps can’t control all callbacks–but fairness is relative, meaning reps should mitigate the likelihood of a callback to be among the better performers.
We’re curious as to how you measure FCR. What have you settled on as the best way to surface this crucial data?
CCC members, determine which FCR metric is best for your environment, review CCC’s FCR benchmarking data, and assess how well your frontline staff diagnoses, owns, and resolves issues.
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on March 12, 2010
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Our business measures First Contact Resolution through customer surveys completed via phone interview within 48 hours of the customer interacting with us. We also look at First Contact Resolution through quality monitoring, which will help to identify areas where we haven’t resolved the issue for the customer, but the customer thinks the issue has been resolved. We feel there is a benefit in looking at both results and have found a strong correlation between the two.
Our business is in the early stages of launching speech analytics which we feel will give us a greater understanding of callbacks, the reasons why our customers call back, and the customer emotion in that callback. I completely agree that understanding the reasons for callbacks and potentially implementing changes in process or coaching can help to contribute to next issue avoidance. We look forward to speech analytics providing us a greater understanding of how our business is doing in minimizing callbacks.
on March 19, 2010
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Bill, thanks very much for sharing your perspective. It sounds like your organization is quite progressive in actively tackling the challenges of measuring first contact resolution/next issue avoidance.
Something I’m keen to learn more from you about: You mention that you supplement customer issue resolution survey scores with quality monitoring. Are the results of the quality monitoring efforts focused primarily on frontline staff improvement, or are they more focused on surfacing organizational improvement opportunities? And what criteria, tools, and training have you provided your quality monitoring staff to focus on issue resolution? CCC has created a tool (CCC members: https://ccc.executiveboard.com/Members/ResearchAndTools/Abstract.aspx?cid=100134857&fs=1&q=coaching+starter+guide&program=&ds=1 ) that offers some guidelines, but I would be interested to learn more from you here as well. Based on conversations with multiple companies about this, I know many struggle here.
on November 15, 2010
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Your recommendation that callback tracking should be used is very insightful… honestly, I’m in the same camp. I think the process of measurement having so many “holes” in it (being inaccurate) has even motivated folks to not even measure FCR.
A January, 2008 study by ICMI showed that:
* Just over 50 percent of the almost 300 contact center professionals surveyed measured FCR for live agent calls.
* 25 percent said they tracked FCR for e-mail.
* Less than 4 percent measured FCR for issues processed via chat.
( http://www.impactlearning.com/resources/first%20contact%20resolution/ )
The study above shows that about 1/2 of contact center companies surveyed didn’t even measure FCR! I think as callback tracking moves to the standard, more of those who haven’t even started measuring this metric will…
Thanks for the thought-provoking article!
on August 30, 2011
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[...] many ways to optimize issue resolution and case closure, something CCC has researched extensively: measuring resolution more effectively, improving the knowledge base, and even revising staff incentives, among other strategies. [...]