First Call Resolution – Bringing Quality in Your Call Centre
Let’s us face it – When you call someone to ask about a problem issue that a product or service that you have just bought has, the last thing that you want to hear is for the call representative to run you in circles, only to tell you to call back again the next day because they can’t produce any solutions for your problem. How pissed will you go over that situation? I know I will be extremely over my top, I will swear off in using their products ever again.
Quality service is not only a nice addition, but is a necessity. You should move your call centre’s department above and beyond the vicious circle of cost cutting and decreasing customer satisfaction. This will only lead you in one direction – high staff turnover and customer dissatisfaction.
Instead of focusing your call centre resources into managing the number of calls, why not focus on the each individual call outcome? Most call centre managers only look at the statistics and not the outcome of each individual calls. This results in the call centre losing sight of the customer and the vital role of ensuring the customer’s continued support. The vendors then keeps on inventing more technology which could further turn the service rep from a dedicated and proud member of a team helping build the future revenue stream of the company into a mindless talking agent interested only in increasing number of calls per day and making them short.
Measure what really matters. If the goal is a satisfied customer that buys or uses the company’s product or service at a cost both parties are happy with, then break down the math: Satisfied length of time and cost. Calculating the cost will be no problem. However, what about the customer’s satisfaction? First Call Resolution (FCR) is one way of handling that.
Why is First Call Resolution (FCR) so important to a contact centre? FCR has been found to be the single most important key challenge to improving Customer Satisfaction. The absence of FCR can account for a one-third of a call centre’s operational cost!
Focusing on FCR results in the best of both worlds – improving productivity and customer satisfaction! FCR can help you:
- Reduce operating costs - A centre running at a 67% first call resolution rate receives 33% of its call volume from customers who have to call back because their issue was not resolved the first time - an enormous cost!
- Improve customer satisfaction - Customer satisfaction drops an average
- 15% with each call back, making a large impact on overall satisfaction.
- Increase opportunities to sell - A customer’s needs must be resolved before the agent can move on to any sort of sales activity. If the agent moves to the cross-sell too early, the customer may feel that the organization is pushing its needs, rather than serving them.
- Improve employee satisfaction - An organization with low FCR often has low employee satisfaction and high turnover. This is easy to understand; agent stress levels rise as they deal with frustrated customers making a second or third call to resolve an issue.
First Call Resolution – A how-to in achieving it
First and foremost, make sure your call centre is equipped with a good CRM to handle customer’s database in a single view. You do not want to have to open up multiple windows just to navigate to your customer’s details.
Educate and train your call centre representative with the proper information and know-how such as company culture, procedures rules and regulations and products and services. Also train them in engaging the customer, establishing communication, build relationships with them and identifying and fulfilling the customers needs.
Most importantly, give call centre representatives the authority to go with all those responsibilities in dealing with customers. That means allowing them to cut across major bureaucratic routes. Create rules to allow them to do those things without it getting to complex and ending up another red tape barrier.
Always encourage FCR in most situations and have a scoring based on FCR. Give Awards to representatives with the most FCR at every month or so to drive them to do better.
Ask your current representatives what the things that hinder such FCR attitude are. They will definitely come up with a list of rules that will widen your horizon. Document them and have them resolved. The key to start the FCR attitude is to have all these stumbling blocks out of the way for you to pass through to the next level.
Lastly, have a quality management system in place to allow for you to document all the problems and value add service the call centre has been providing over the period.
Not only will your customers be happier, they will definitely come back for more. They may even recommend their friends to your products or services, which in turn is an indication of increased revenue. So, start earning by first giving quality service.
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