Contact Center Quality Management Featured Article

We’ve all been there: calling a company for help, then getting shuttled around from person to person as our blood pressure rises. It’s vexing, to say the least.

But believe it or not, it’s also perceived as a problem for those on the other end of the call, the very people we want to help us. They’re being monitored by their bosses, and they know it’s in their best interest to get you the solution you want, on your first call.

It’s called “First Call Resolution,” and it’s a target more and more conscientious companies are aiming for.

In a recent piece on TechRadar.com, Larry Lien, VP of product management and marketing at Resolve Systems, addressed the issue.

“We all have high expectations for our service providers and very little patience for long waits on the phone to get help with a sluggish Internet connection or cable TV outage,” Lien said. “The old adage, ‘It takes a village’ applies in many of these situations because it truly does require CSPs [Communications Service Providers] to adopt an ‘all hands on deck’ mentality to focus on the customer, to be successful in the long run. From the CEO, to engineering, to the field technician, to sales, putting the customer first must be Job One.”

To help others better see the light, Lien listed some pointers he picked up from other pros in the business. To wit:

Process guidance capabilities should be front and center: “Customer Service Reps, the first in line for problem resolution, tend to be filled by less trained and less technical staff,” Lien noted. Because of the lack of training and technical know-how, and minimal tools that provide clear resolution procedures, these agents become escalation points because they require an experienced, trusted engineer to carry out the technical diagnostic, assessment and repair tasks the incident requires. Solution? Better training up front.

Process Improvement needs to be continuous: “New services and new, more effective ways to resolve incidents are driving CSPs to create more sophisticated support processes,” he said. This is an important area that should be constantly upgraded.

Automation is not "one size fits all": The ability to automate some or all of the procedure can dramatically improve time-to-resolution. “But,” Lien notes, “to fully leverage and optimize the power of automation, the resolution system should provide capabilities to automate sub-tasks in the manual resolution process as well as end-to-end procedures.”

Collaboration between support teams is crucial: This one is self-explanatory.

Leveraging the power of analytics drives productivity and efficiency: “CSPs can leverage the power of analytics to drive productivity and efficiency in the resolution process during the lifecycle of the incident: from trigger to resolution.” In other words, use the tools you have.

“By putting these proven incident management best practices into action, CSPs can keep their high priority commitment to putting the customer first,” Lien concludes.