Why FCR is Key & How to Achieve It

There are a wide array of key performance indicators contact centers use to measure their success. But first call resolution may be the most important one.

FCR is key because it considers both customer satisfaction and operational efficiency aspects of the call center. Yet Service Quality Management last year said the average call center resolves 72 percent of calls on the first call. The North American research firm suggests that world-class call centers have FCR performance of 80 percent of higher. But it adds that just 5 percent of call centers achieve 80 percent FCR.

If an agent has achieved FCR, that worker has reduced the effort the customer would otherwise have had to expend to get his or her issue resolved. That customer probably has a higher satisfaction level than he or she would’ve had otherwise.

Indeed, SQM says 86 percent of customers expect the call center to resolve their issue on the first call. “Each time a customer has to call back to the call center to resolve an issue that was not resolved on the first call, Csat (top box survey response) drops, on average, 15 percent,” reports SQM. “In other words, if a customer calls a call center three times to resolve their issue, on average, Csat (top box response) will drop 30 percent.”

Successful FCR also provides productivity benefits to the agent and contact center. The agents can use the time they didn’t spend on subsequent calls with this customer to help other callers or do other work. And the call center doesn’t have to use human and other resources only to keep spinning its wheels with the same customer and the same issue.

So what can call centers do to improve on the important FCR KPI? The answer is a few things.

One is conveying the message to agents that first call resolution is a priority. In addition to emphasizing that during initial agent training, contact center management should reiterate that message during ongoing coaching. In fact, contact center managers should design onboarding training and coaching programs with FCR in mind. The contact center should also consider offering agents incentives to achieve FCR.

They say what gets measured gets managed (or improved). So call centers need to measure FCR and use their tracking systems and agent-customer recordings to see what’s happening on the FCR front, what is happening in interactions that lead to FCR, and how that can be duplicated in the future.