Call centers have one of the most important duties in an entire organization; making sure the customers receive high-quality customer experience. In order to ensure your contact center is fulfilling your company’s requirements and living up to your standards, they monitor a variety of KPIs. One of the most important KPIs a contact center monitors is First Call Resolution. Many customers expect to have their issue resolved through the first person they speak to at your contact center, but unfortunately, call centers can often fail to deliver on this goal. A recent article by Hagai Shaham gives six examples of inside and outside factors that affect your call center first call resolution rate.
The first things to look at are the factors happening within your call center. Shaham states that in order to have a good FCR call center rate, you’ll need a combination of the following factors:
1) Quality: The right agents make all the difference when it comes to the customer experience. Hire people who fit your company culture and are equipped with skills that can’t be trained, such as empathy. If your agents can relate to the customers on a personal level and genuinely care when they’re listening to them, they’ll be more successful in resolving the customers’ issues.
2) Knowledge: Once you’ve hired the right people with the best intangible skills, the training must be at a high level as well. This means using real-life examples and practical lessons that make the education seem natural and not mechanical. You can hire great people, but they won’t be successful if you don’t provide great training.
3) Motivation: People aren’t strictly motivated by money, they’re also motivated by appreciation and feeling like a valued member of the company. If you’re constantly hassling the agents to work harder and faster without taking time to show them support, they’ll more than likely get burned out and cynical. Show your agents that you appreciate them by acknowledging them for accomplishments and always let them know you have their back. In addition, making the work environment more fun can be a great motivator. Gamification and incentive programs can help build a fun work environment for call center agents.
4) Technology: A key component in keeping up with the demands of modern customer service is having the right technology to provide as many service channels as possible and also create a personalized customer experience. However, having technology doesn’t mean anything if the company isn’t set up properly to use it. Always make sure you have employees who are up-to-date on the latest technologies, provide the proper training and implementation methods, and never stop seeking ways to improve.
Once you’ve looked internally at the ways you can improve your call center, it’s time to look at outside factors that affect First Call Resolution. Shaham shows that it all comes down to a couple factors: customers and the product.
Customers: It’s much easier to handle a customer call when the agent is dealing with a person in a pleasant and easy-going mood. But the reality is not every customer will be easy to help. There will be customers who start the call with an angry or even hostile tone and, if the agent isn’t able to maintain composure and win over the customer, the odds go down for having a First Call Resolution. Shaham’s article says that there are a variety of issues within your customer experience that could lead up to an angry or frustrated customer, including long hold times, confusing IVR systems, and pre-conceived notions of your service from reputation. Both the customer and the agent need to be willing to work together in order to achieve a resolution on the first call, but this can be a challenge if there are issues with the overall customer experience leading up to the call.
Product: It doesn’t matter how great your call center is if the company has a bad product or service. If your product/service is bad, it’s best to start by fixing it with user experience testing before you can expect the First Call Resolution KPI to reflect as desired. If your company is getting a lot of angry calls about the product specifically, the chances are good the call center isn’t the problem.
This blog post is based on an article from CustomerThink. To read the original article, please click the link below:
First Call Resolution – The Key to Success and Failure – Hagai Shaham
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