First Call Resolution: How Essential Is It?

What are the best ways to enhance the productivity of a call center? A lot of managers are concerned with this question nowadays because they wish to make their business profitable and successful. If you are puzzled with this problem as well, then you will certainly benefit from learning more about call center KPIs.

What kind of capital an organization should have

What kind of capital an organization should have

At present, the prevailing number of experienced call center managers believe that some KPIs are more critical when it comes to improving customer satisfaction, loyalty, proper call center performance and employee productivity.  These are response time, adherence to schedule, contact quality, self-service accessibility and first call resolution. It has been recently proven that the latter indicator has a greater impact upon the level of customer satisfaction as compared to others.

What qualities KPIs should have?

What qualities KPIs should have?

What makes first call resolution rate so critical? To answer this question, you initially have to think about the motives and expectations of people trying to contract call center agents. What do they need? How is it possible to meet their requirements in the best way? A lot of callers, by the way, are puzzled with specific problems and they obviously wish them to be solved the sooner-the better. The speed of answer means a lot for them, but that’s still not the best factor they are looking for. What they expect is to have their problems solved qualitatively. Otherwise, they will have either to make extra calls (which is a waste of time for them) or look for other call centers.  With regard to this, it becomes clear that the higher the rate of first-call resolution is – the better the overall customer experience may become. A call center, by the way, will benefit from this situation as well, since the decreased amount of repeated calls will eventually result in the reduction of call center expenses and enhancement of its financial performance.

In case first-calls resolution leaves much to be desired in your company, you should define what exactly causes the problem. Actually, there may be several reasons for that. For example, your agents may occasionally face situations, when they know the solution to callers’ requests, but do not possess the required authority to solve them. They do not have any other choice but to ask people to stay on-hold for a specified time interval, which undoubtedly increases the amount of unsatisfied customers and abandoned calls. Another problem is that some agents may not have proper training and knowledge required to deal with all inbound calls effectively.  These are only a few issues you should analyze and consider if you intend to enhance your call center performance.

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