6 Tips to Improve Your First Call Resolution (FCR)

One of the most important call center metrics is the famous first call resolution, or FCR. It’s critical to keep an eye and pulse on your FCR. A low score can amplify costs, while a high score can enhance revenue. So how do we improve the score to improve revenue? First, it’s important to understand what it’s a conglomerate of, and then we can move into the playbook.

 

What makes up FCR?

First call resolution: One of several call center KPIs that give you a good look into your customer experience. FCR takes the percentage of contacts made or requests from a customer and compares that against the completion in one session. It now includes several contact methods, such as calls, emails, chats and social media direct messages. By completing it in one session, you are successfully taking care of that contact or request in that one call with that one agent. To sweeten the pot even more, you also gain happier customers and brand loyalty.

So how do you take that definition and figure out where you need to draw your focus? Don’t worry, we’ve done a lot of the hard work for you. Follow these tips below to help transform your strategy.

 

1. Clean up your resource hub.

You need a place that has all the answers – both internally and externally. However, make sure there are individual versions for both. First, you need an intranet, or any other single place for knowledge articles, that is easily accessible by your employees. Not only should it be accessible, but they should be able to easily search and sift through topics in it.

Now, as far as external goes, there should be a customer-facing FAQ or help page that is based off of your knowledge articles. Of course, you don’t want to externalize proprietary information, but you need to have someone that can oversee your intranet and help translate topics and provide answers for your customers. Also, review frequent questions your customers are asking – these will be crucial pieces to include in your outward knowledge base.

 

2. Level up your agents.

Bring your agents up to the next level. How? Take a look at what your employee experience is like at the moment. You might think this is about culture or prizes at first glance, which wouldn’t hurt, honestly. But moreso, are your agents:

1. 1. • Equipped with the right tools and knowledge?
      • Offered further training or cross-training options?
      • Empowered to go off-script for situations that call for it?

You get the opportunity to decide how valuable of an asset your call center agents are. If you provide them with the proper tools to get their jobs done, you’ll be surprised how much they thrive. Offer them more education, training and flexibility? You can expect to start seeing major improvements with your FCR.  

 

3. Adjust your stance.

Naturally, if you’re wanting to improve your first call resolution, some other metrics may need to shift. The threshold for your average handle time (AHT) will probably need to increase. A better customer journey experience means better first call resolution, which means you’ll need to attribute more time to those individuals and solve their requests on the spot.

Don’t be afraid to test your methods either. You control how concrete something is. Start off by seeing how these new parameters work on a monthly basis. Gather data from the results of your shifts and decide from there whether you need to adjust your thresholds again due to some other metrics or if what you did is the tweak you needed.

 

4. Hold routine strategy sessions.

You need to open the lines of communication – not just with your customers, but with your employees. With your agents being on the front line of communication with customers, they probably know a few things about the trends of issues that may be arising.

Allow your employees to have a voice and arrange time to gather feedback from your team. Figure out the trends of issues from the assessments you’re collecting and determine where the gaps are. It could be that your team is collectively missing out on information to provide the appropriate response and solution. Perhaps this lets other departments know there are bugs that need to be immediately addressed, which could then reduce these similar groups of complaints. You don’t know what you don’t know, so invite the voices that do to speak.

 

5. Have omnichannel call center data analytics.

It sounds like a mouthful, but it’s full of the important nutrients your strategy needs. If you’re only pulling from your telephonic outputs, you are missing a massive chunk of your customer data. According to Invesp, companies that engage on an omnichannel level retain an average of 89% of their customers. It’s easy to see how important the full picture is. 

If you’re not already, make sure your systems are set up to both support and pull your call center data from an omnichannel perspective. You could be waving customers goodbye if you don’t. 

 

6. Ensure your data visualization is really in real-time.

Have you dug to make sure that your reporting is actually offering your data visualization dashboards in real-time? Oftentimes, bundles will claim to offer real-time data for you, and simply won’t be as up-to-date as you actually need it to be. With up to thousands of employees depending on accurate information to upkeep your customer journey strategy, you can’t afford to leave it to chance on how timely your reporting is showing.

 

It’s a ubiquitous understanding that first call resolution is one of the most crucial metrics in the customer journey map. Don’t get lost in the pressures and forget to actually take a look under the hood. By taking moments to reassess your plan of action, your time and efforts could be looking at extra dollars.

 

---

 

Want to see how Aceyus can help with your first call resolution strategy? Contact us for a free solutions consultation.

Find out more