Insight from Interactions

First call resolution, or FCR, is one of contact centers’ most important metrics. The concept is simple, right? You just measure the rate at which contacts are resolved on the first call, without the customer having to call again, and you have your FCR rate. Okay, sure. But how do you know when the same customer calls more than once regarding the same issue? Here’s a hint: it isn’t by caller ID. Tracking calls by calling number yields too many false positives (a customer might call two times in a row for two completely different issues) and false negatives (a customer might call from home, then call again from a cell phone.) So how can you truly measure FCR?

Hear the voice of the customer. The best way to know a call is a repeat call is to listen to what customers tell you. It does not take a rocket scientist to know that, when a customer says “I called yesterday,” or “this is the second time I’m calling,” you have a repeat call. All it takes is good speech analytics  software. This is the best way to avoid false negatives, and identify repeat calls regardless of the caller ID used in each case.  

Identify the customer, not the phone number.  What about repeat calls in which customers do not mention they already called? To cover these, rather than using caller ID, look for customer ID or, even better, problem or ticket ID. The best way to identify these is to peek at the agent desktop. Agents typically use a CRM application that shows the customer ID, account number or ticket number. This data may be “scraped” from the agent screen and associated with the archived customer call such that it can subsequently be used to identify repeat calls.

Measure first contact resolution, not first call resolution. Do you allow your customers to contact you via email? How about online chat? If you do any of those, you must measure first contact resolution across the different channels. A customer might send an email to address an issue, and follow up with a phone call if the issue is not resolved. Make sure you get a holistic view of the customer experience across all touch points, and that your agents truly do resolve customer issues the first time, every time.

Do you remember your local grocery store—the one closest to home when you were a kid? The owner knew you and your family members by name. He knew what you bought and, if you hadn’t paid him a visit in a while, he would ask your mother if you were okay. He knew what you liked and, if he didn’t have what you wanted, he would order it especially for you. In short, you had a relationship. His prices may have been a fraction higher than the larger supermarket, but no one there knew you. You didn’t mind paying a little more for that personal connection.

The bottom-line value of this kind of connection has not gone unnoticed among larger grocery chains. Over the last few years, they have been investing big bucks in innovative technologies to help them get to know their customers as well, if not better, than their mom-and-pop rivals. They issue coupons for the products customers are most likely to buy, based on their previous purchases, invite them to promotional events and more. The supermarket is going head-to-head with the neighborhood grocery store in the battle for customer intimacy.

The battleground extends well beyond grocers. Small to mid-size businesses worldwide face the same challenge. The key asset that differentiated them from large competitors was knowledge of their customers, attained through their customer service operations. But that advantage—a hallmark of the small to medium contact centers that support local and regional businesses—is eroding.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the simple call recording that’s done in the small to medium contact center (SMCC) today is regarded as standard but increasingly insufficient for competitive purposes. With the risk of losing the battle for customer intimacy, more robust applications for SMCCs have become a must. According to the Datamonitor report, “Small and Suite: The Mid-Size Contact Center” (April 23, 2009), “Because large enterprises also seek ways to personalize customer self-service, customer intimacy is a battle that mid-size contact centers cannot afford to lose.”

It’s somewhat ironic that today SMCCs need to invest in business applications to protect the intimacy advantage that once came so naturally. But as IBM correctly states, “To survive, mid-size companies must be agile enough to respond to the pressures to compete on levels not required in the past.” This may mean that SMCCs must explore the kinds of technologies—and price points—once reserved for bigger players. It’s an opportunity for SMCCs and their call recording solution vendors to provide advanced customer service applications that best fit SMCC needs and budgets. It will be interesting to see how they rise to the challenge.