3 best practices for first call resolution

Today’s competitive consumer marketplace demands that customer-facing companies adopt strategies to foster meaningful interactions with customers.  It’s no longer enough to provide good customer service – organizations need to constantly be thinking about now to build and maintain customer relationships to drive customer loyalty and retention.

Forrester’s latest “State of Loyalty Strategies” report, in fact, shows 80% of decision makers at large organizations have set customer loyalty as their top marketing priority for the coming year.  Nearly half (47%) see “engaging customers” as a key objective, while 33% see acquiring new customers as central to their coming loyalty program plans.

In the contact center, first call resolution (FCR) is crucial to the overall success of an organization, as it drives customer loyalty, profitability, and workplace efficiency.  It comes as no surprise that call centers should have metrics in place to properly monitor FCR – given its immense value.

CallMiner will be addressing first call resolution best practices during an upcoming webinar  presented by CRMXchange. Let’s take a look at the following key points the webinar will touch on:

See the Whole Picture

Today’s customers aren’t on one channel in particular – they’re everywhere and they expect companies to respond across channels in near real time.

“Customers will use preferred channels for specific contact reasons,” notes CRMXchange.  “Staff [should] be allotted to these communication channels based on expertise and ability to achieve FCR.  Additionally, the omni-channel customer experience should include self-service options, but sometimes the customer isn’t able to solve their problem on their own.”

During the webinar, panelists will discuss how to see the “whole picture” by combining technology such as call recording, analytics, and surveys.

Respond & React to Customer Data

Companies failing to leverage customer data from across channels – surveys, social media, customer feedback during calls, etc. – are putting themselves at a severe detriment.  The idea is to take customer feedback from whichever channel it comes to improve agent performance and ultimately provide an enhanced customer experience.

As noted by Call Centre Helper, social media in particular is “useful for identifying FCR failures…it’s easier to be positive to someone over the phone, but people are much tougher in social media feedback.”

Roundtable panelists will discuss how companies can respond – and react – to customer feedback during the webcast.

Leverage Interaction Analytics to Optimize FCR Results

According to research conducted by The Ascent Group, 60% of companies measuring FCR for a year or longer report a 1 – 30% improvement in their performance.  The key to achieving these kinds of results is having interaction analytics in place to immediately reveal insights from automated analysis of communications between agents and customer across channels.

During the webinar, panels will address best practices for leveraging interaction analytics to optimize FCR results, including:

• How to conduct root cause analysis of language, acoustics, and metadata to uncover repeat contact drivers
• How to determine optimal outcome paths for both individual contacts as well as customer journeys over multi-channels of communication
• How to address FCR impacting issues across process, people, policy, products, and systems

Final Thoughts

First call resolution is starting to become less about customer satisfaction, and more about customer interaction.  As a result, companies need to shift their focus so they’re creating meaningful interactions with customers that develop deeper relationships and drive opportunities to achieve greater first call resolution rates.