Remote operations
Marc Prempain
15 April 2024
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First Call Resolution is a call center metric that determines the percentage of calls with customers that are resolved in a single interaction. This KPI helps agents track how well they are resolving customer issues. This is critical since problems solved during the first call are correlated with higher customer satisfaction and better call or contact center efficiency.
Customer support has taken on new importance as customer interactions have moved away from physical stores to a digital marketplace. Customers expect the same level of service as in person, so it is crucial to measure your call center’s overall performance as well as your individual agents. Key performance indicators (KPIs) like AHT, NPS, and FCR are vital to measuring this performance. So, in concrete terms, what does FCR show you about your center?
FCR stands for First Call Resolution. It is a key performance indicator for call centers and contact centers. It gives you an idea of how effectively your call center can solve a customer issue. KPIs are helpful to keep an eye on the overall situation of your call center, but they will not tell you HOW to improve it. Understanding the First call resolution rate is vital because it will show you whether the approach you are taking to improve your center is working or not. If your FCR is too low, it means something is wrong.
First call resolution rate, or FCR rate, is a metric for customer satisfaction. It measures the proportion of customer interactions where support agents are able to resolve the customer’s question or issue in a single interaction, without having to call or message the customer at another time. Higher first call resolution rates are associated with higher customer satisfaction rates.
In a call center, First Call Resolution is one of the KPIs that are often measured to determine how successfully agents can resolve customer inquiries or problems. If call center agents have to call customers back several times before they are able to provide a solution, then the FCR rate will stay low. This is important because resolving customer interactions in one call will result in a more positive customer experience. A good CX will improve customer satisfaction and turn clients into loyal brand promoters.
Active Contact Resolution, or ACR, is a metric similar to FCR. It measures the rate of customer interactions that are resolved without needing customers to call back in the following days or weeks. This metric takes time to measure but is very important for understanding a company’s continued customer satisfaction and long-term customer experience. As an example, if a support agent’s ACR rate is 80%, then that means that 8 out of 10 customers were able to fully resolve their issue during the initial interaction and didn’t need to call back for additional support in the days that followed.
First call resolution is essential to achieving customer satisfaction. If customers have to make repeat calls to fix their issues, they are less likely to use your product or service again. Customer experiences are increasingly important to consumers. 50% of customers surveyed by Zendesk said that customer experience became more important to them in the past year. It is more important than ever to improve first call resolution to keep your customers happy. An improved FCR will lower your incoming call volume, thus saving your call center time and resources.
First call resolution is an incredibly important measurement for customer support services. It monitors and measures the whole company’s and individual support agents’ abilities to manage and solve customer support requests in one interaction. This can include contact in the form of calls, emails, social media messages, etc.
FCR is important, but in order to know where you stand, you need to be able to measure your own FCR rate. There are many call center software to calculate this for individual agents and support teams, but it is still helpful to understand how to calculate it in order to determine how to improve it. To calculate FCR, companies can use the following formula:
This formula shows the percentage of calls where the customer’s issue was resolved without needing a follow-up call. Measuring FCR can be done manually or by call center software such as ViiBE. ViiBE makes tracking FCR and other call center metrics in real-time easier than ever. You can manage ViiBE’s virtual call center remotely from anywhere in the world using the built-in KPI trackers that measure FCR in real-time. If an individual agent’s performance is lagging, you can compare the FCR between your different employees. It is a good idea to track FCR over time to visualize the evolution of your call center’s performance in customer service.
Each customer call should be handled with the utmost care even before the customer reaches an agent. While FCR will give you a good idea of your call center’s performance, action is required to make a real improvement. There are several components necessary to improve your call center’s performance. Here are a few approaches to improving your customer experience:
Training your employees effectively and regularly will ensure they are ready to handle any situation. If you neglect proper training, your employees will waste time figuring out how to handle new situations. Knowledge management goes alongside training as an important way to increase employee competence. Implementing a knowledge management solution will help them access the most recent information at any time and distribute knowledge evenly among your employees. If knowledgeable employees leave, their know-how will be preserved in the knowledge base for other agents to use.
Following up with the customers who could not resolve their issues within the first call will help you pinpoint weaknesses in your call center. ViiBE’s knowledge base allows you to integrate examples of past customer interactions into your knowledge base for use in training. The ticketing solution organizes multiple calls under the same ticket and uses tags to flag reoccurring issues. This feature makes finding specific issues or individual customer calls fast and efficient, so you can prevent problems from recurring. After implementing these approaches, the FCR rate will show you if they have been effective or not.
ViiBE makes tracking FCR effortless. At the end of each call, the customer has the opportunity to give feedback on their “exit journey” in a short survey. They can indicate whether the issue was resolved, whether an in-person trip by an expert was needed, and rate the overall service. This data is added to ViiBE to update your center-wide and individual agent KPIs automatically. This powerful feature will give you a real-time overview of your call center’s performance and enable you to focus on weak points to improve the customer experience.
Call center management should be simple, but so should the customer’s experience. ViiBE’s no-installation web app ensures your customer can quickly connect to an agent on any device. ViiBE maximizes the capabilities of omnichannel communication to provide a more convenient customer experience. During a call, the agent can annotate pictures and documents during calls using paint mode or adding arrows. They can request to reverse the customer’s camera to see the customer’s issue firsthand. ViiBE empowers your agents to improve communication by letting them choose the right channel for the situation. Instant messaging adds another channel of communication and makes it easy for customers with hearing difficulties or connection issues to communicate with ViiBE.
First Call Resolution is an essential key performance indicator for any call center. It clearly shows if your call center is resolving customer issues efficiently and helps to identify your center’s weaknesses. ViiBE empowers your call center to improve its performance and efficiency. Its tools are designed to support a variety of approaches to this improvement, such as training, knowledge management, and omnichannel communication. Whatever method you take to improving your call center, FCR will show you if you’re on the right track. ViiBE integrates FCR into its interface and calculates in real-time for each agent based on live customer feedback. ViiBE makes it simple to improve your call center while giving your customer an effortless and convenient experience.
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