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11
May

Tips for Improving Your FCR Rate

Last month, we talked about why FCR (First Call Resolution) is important in helping you assess customer satisfaction. Not only do customers get frustrated if they need to keep explaining their issues over and over without getting a resolution, but your operating costs are higher because these calls unnecessarily increase your call volume, requiring you to schedule more agents.  We also talked about a few guidelines for measuring FCR, from tracking the number of callback from the same phone numbers to using a CRM together with you telephone reporting solution for higher levels of accuracy.

Now, let’s look at a few ways to try to improve your FCR rate.

Encourage your agents to take the time necessary to resolve the issue

Sometimes, agents can become too focused on call turnover. They feel that the more calls they take, the better their performance. However, if your agents are giving incomplete or inaccurate solutions just to get the customer off the phone, you have a problem. If you’re lucky, these callers will call back once they realized their issue isn’t resolved. If you’re not, these callers will take their future business to one that provides better after-sales support. Make sure your agents know that you’ll accept an increase in talk time, as long as the FCR rate is at an acceptable level.

Train your agents on how to resolve the top 10 issues

Whether your call center handles service requests or support issues, there are probably common inquiries that occur on a regular basis. One of the easiest ways to improve your FCR rate is to make sure that your agents know how to handle these inquiries efficiently. For example, new hires to your call center should have the training to deal with common complaints, instead of having to put a call on hold to ask another agent what to do. Similarly, the introduction of a new product or service may result in new inquiries from customers, but again, many customer may have the same questions. Identifying what the current most frequently asked questions are, and updating them over time, can help you give agents the information they need to resolve customer issues during the first call.

Ask the customer

Since your customer is the one who decides if their issue has been resolved, have someone ask them. As part of the call script, agents can ask callers whether their issue has been answered before closing the call. If the caller has any outstanding questions, they have the opportunity to discuss them now with the agent, rather than calling back at a later time. If the caller does feel the issue is resolved, asking the question gives clear confirmation of this for both the agent and the caller.

If you have the tools available, you can ask callers to complete a short, automated survey when the call is completed. The purpose of many of these surveys is to get feedback on agent performance and effectiveness, so it’s a good idea to include a question about whether the caller’s issue was resolved.

Improving your FCR rate can require proactive efforts, both on your part to set expectations for agents in terms of talk time and training, and on your agent’s part to proactively work to get calls resolved the first time. You may want to provide incentives or take other measures to drive awareness among your agents about FCR and its effect on the success of your organization. While it may take some time for your FCR rates to improve, it is a good investment in keeping customer loyal to your business.

See you next month.

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Posted in Call Center Operations, Customer Relationship Management, Measuring Performance

12
Apr

The Role of First Call Resolution in Assessing Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction. We’re always trying to improve it through new programs and services, analysis of key metrics and employee performance, and, if possible, direct communication with our customers. The variables in play can seem daunting when trying to understand even fundamental drivers for customer satisfaction. For example, your customers’ preferences for communicating with you can vary significantly depending on demographics such as age, geographical location, and disposable income.

All of our efforts are worth the investment because keeping customers happy keeps them coming back to us. While it isn’t easy to sort through all the factors than can affect customer satisfaction, there’s one statistic that is generally accepted as a good indicator.

In its simplest form, FCR (First Call Resolution) means that when a caller hangs up at the end of the first call to your contact center about an issue, it’s resolved. The caller doesn’t call back for followup on the same issue.

Why is FCR important?

Let’s look at the two primary issues with low FCR rates.

  • Customer frustration. Imagine a customer who needs to call back on the same issue more than once. There aren’t too many customers that would be happy to explain the same issue again each time they call. On top of that, customers also need to explain why previous responses didn’t resolve the issue. With each call, a customer may actually spend increasing amounts of time describing both the issue and the background to the agent they are dealing with on the current call.
  • Call center expenses. Callbacks about unresolved issues are costly. Repeat callers increase your call volume, taking up space in queues and time of agents. The article First Call Resolution—It’s Impact and Measurement details the direct impact to costs of repeat callers on the same issue. At a high-level, though, you can see that by reducing callbacks, you lower call volumes and require fewer resources, which in turn lowers your operating expenses.

How do you measure FCR?

Unfortunately, there isn’t one accepted way of measuring FCR. You need to decide what the conditions or factors are for declaring a call as closed. Here are some guidelines that you may want to consider when setting this measure for your call center:

  • Timeframe. Generally, it’s accepted that if a caller does not call back within three days on the same issue, you can assume that it no longer exists. If you’re using a telephone reporting solution, you may be able to report on the number of repeat, inbound calls from the same phone numbers within a given timeframe.
  • Case Resolution Statistics. If you’re using a CRM, you can look at the statistics for new versus resolved cases. If the number of newly opened cases for a day remain unresolved at the end of the day, you can probably assume that cases aren’t being closed during the initial calls.

Ideally, you’re using a CRM together with a telephone reporting solution. The data available from the CRM on case closures combined with information about the number of ACD calls received can give you further insights into FCR within the context of your overall call volume.

When talking about FCR, keep one qualifier in mind. There are varying degrees of customer satisfaction. Just because a customer doesn’t call back on the same issue doesn’t mean they were completely satisfied with the handling of their issue. While it’s always a good idea for agents to escalate calls when more senior agents are better suited to deal with a caller, you certainly don’t want your callers transferred among several agents in a search for one who can help. Even if the call ended with a resolution for the customer, the level of satisfaction probably isn’t very high because of the disruptive nature of the call flow. As well, you’ll probably see higher abandon rates as a result of customers who simply got tired of being transferred.

Next month, we’ll look at a few ways to try to improve your FCR rate.

See you next month.

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Posted in Call Center Operations, Customer Relationship Management

08
Mar

Using Historical Data to Predict Staffing Requirements

Last month, we talked about the value of a predictive approach to forecasting call volumes and staffing requirements based on past activity. Using historical data to identify meaningful call patterns helps you make accurate assumptions about upcoming demands on the call center.

Let’s take a closer look at some considerations for using historical data to schedule resources appropriately in the future.

Monitor statistics that will provide the most value

With so many statistics available to you, it’s important to identify the ones that are going to give you the best basis for identifying call patterns over time.  Trying to monitor too many statistics can be overwhelming when trying to identify high-level trends, which we’ll talk about next.

The statistics you choose will depend on your business objectives, but here are a few that you may want to consider:

    • “Maximum calls waiting” is a count of the maximum number of calls that were waiting in a queue during a particular time period, sometimes referred to as the queue depth. The acceptable queue depth may be different for various queues in your call center. A sales queue may have a very limited acceptable queue depth while a returns and exchanges queue may allow for a higher one.
    • “Abandons” is a count of the number of calls where callers who expected to be answered hung up before this happened.  This statistic is a good indicator of how many callers hung up because they became frustrated waiting in a queue or on hold.
    • “Average Available Agents” (or Average Positions Manned) indicates the average number of agents who were logged in for a given time period. These are your agents who were available or connected to ACD calls. Typically, you would want this number to be close to the total number of agents scheduled for the shift.

Know how queue and agent statistics can highlight high-level trends

While individual statistics are important, there’s significant benefit to understanding how they work together at a higher level.  For example, while it’s good to know the average depth of a queue and the number of abandons, it’s better to look at what these statistics tell you about activity in those queues.

Say that you have a queue where a maximum of ten to fifteen calls wait on average. If the abandon rate for the queue is low, check how quickly calls are answered.  If calls wait less than five seconds before being answered, you may conclude that the queue was staffed appropriately for the given call volume.

If the abandon rate is high, try to find the reason for this before assuming that your queue depth was not acceptable. For example, a junior agent may have call durations that are longer than other agents in the same queue. To help this agent deal with calls more quickly, you may want to provide additional training. Another reason for high abandon rates is that there just were not enough agents logged into the queue. If you believe that shift schedules were sufficient, find out why some agents were not logged in.

Know your consumers

Consumer expectations and behaviors may be the most significant factor affecting call volumes.  Did most of your calls come in during the day or evening? At what point did the critical mass of calls change from product inquiries to actual purchases? Did call volume increase as the result of consumer response to an email marketing campaign or a newspaper ad?

Because consumer activity will change over time, the pool from which your historical data is extracted should evolve as well. As newer data becomes available, older data should be dropped or weighted with less significance.

With these considerations in mind, you can look at the schedules used in the past and determine whether they were appropriate for expected call activity in the contact center. If your queue depth was acceptable, then it’s likely that the number of agents staffed for that call volume was appropriate. If the queue depth was not acceptable and you’ve ruled out any issues related to agent behavior or system difficulties, then you may want to increase the number of agents scheduled.

Once you gain some experience interpreting statistics and validating your conclusions, you’ll find that predictive forecasting has a wider application than planning for seasonal changes in call volume. Many business growth opportunities directly affect your call center, from a change in business operation hours to the acquisition of a new product or service. Understanding how to identify call volume trends over time will give you a solid basis for predicting both future call volumes and the conditions that may positively or negatively affect them.

See you next month.

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Posted in Call Center Operations

09
Feb

Take the Guesswork Out of Staff Forecasting

We’ve just come through two periods that may have put some pressure on you to closely monitor call volume: the holiday sales period starting on Black Friday and the post-holiday returns and discounts period. We tend to refer to periods such as these as “peak” periods—those where call volumes increase over normal levels for an extended period of time. Depending on the nature of your business, you may have other peaks during the year as seasonal demand for products and services.

Staffing for peak periods can be stressful because accurate staffing goes a long way toward balancing excellent customer service and cost-effective operations.  You want the right staff on hand to handle calls in a timely manner while keeping staff-related costs within budget.

So then, what does it mean to have “the right staff”? There are two common variables to look at here:

  • The number of staff scheduled for shifts.

Overstaffing  can be costly in wages. As well, you may be paying for  more physical space and equipment than you need. Understaffing can be costly in terms of customer service if calls wait too long in queues or you have overtaxed agents trying to deal with customer issues.

  • The experience level of agents.

You need to find the appropriate knowledge balance for each shift. More experienced agents can provide support to junior staff, whether it’s regarding  knowledge transfer or issue resolution. However, you don’t want to overweight shifts with more senior staff than is really needed because these are likely your most expensive staff in terms of wages.

In September’s blog, we talked about the benefits of using workforce management software  to assist with both agent scheduling and adherence. Understanding the agent resources available to you is a good start to staffing shifts properly and in a cost-effective way.

However, developing a predictive approach to forecasting staffing requirements is invaluable. Predictive forecasting means basing future staff schedules on well-founded assumptions about expected demand, such that you can accurately estimate future workloads. In our case, this means anticipating call volume and understanding the resources (such as agent experience and queue capacity) available to meet call demand.

One of the best ways to predict future activity is to look at similar periods in the past. Here’s where a reporting solution can provide a wealth of data. Being able to look not just at last year’s data, but several years of accumulated data helps you separate the meaningful call patterns from the true aberrations. Let’s say that call volume increased 25% in December for four of the past five years. On first glance, it would seem reasonable to plan for a 25% increase this year. It’s important, though, to look at the circumstances around call volume in that fifth year.

  • If call volume was significantly higher than 25%, find out whether your company took any extra measures to reach new customers or to introduce special promotions. There may also have been external reasons, such as an increase in your region’s population or the close of a competitor’s business.
  • If call volume was significantly lower than 25%, try to find whether there is any justification for the decrease. Anything from an economic recession to a shift in the company’s objectives or  executive team should be looked at carefully to understand whether they may come into play this year.

It’s well worth the time to develop a predictive approach to forecasting. When you add up the time between Black Friday and the end of the January sales season, we’re really not talking about a small blip in normal activity. In fact, this time period represents 25% of your annual call patterns. Understanding what happened this year will greatly increase your ability to develop accurate schedules next year.

We hope we’ve given you good reasons to take the guesswork out of staff forecasting. Next month, we’ll look at statistics and techniques that will give you the basis for making accurate predictions.

See you next month.

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Posted in Call Center Operations, Software, Workforce Management

12
Jan

Keeping Your Holiday Customers Happy

Congratulations. You’ve made it through the holiday season.  If you followed the tips in our December blog, you probably picked up new customers, provided incentives for customers to purchase your products or services, and supported your staff through the busiest time of the year. Be careful though. You’re not quite ready yet to take a break and recouperate. Let’s talk about a few things you may encounter in the post-holiday period.

  • Followup service

While we hope that customers are satisfied with the purchases they made leading up to the holidays, it’s best to have plans for dealing with customers who need to return products or request technical assistance. You may also have customers calling to express dissatisfaction over problems with shipping or delivery. Although we try to provide the best service possible, mistakes do happen.

  • Continued high call volumes

In an attempt to boost slower post-holiday sales or to clear last year’s products to make way for new ones, your company may offer deep discounts during January. These discounts may result in calls from customers who, having purchased those same products at higher prices a few weeks ago, have questions about pricing guarentees. (Of course, just like special promotions offered in December, these discounts may attract many potential first-time customers for whom you want to provide an efficient transaction experience.)

Regardless of the reason that existing  customers are calling, make sure your call center can turn them into satisfied customers. Here are a few tips for keeping your customer retention rate as high as possible:

  • Use self-service methods to resolve the customer issue before even being connected to an agent.

In December’s blog, we talked about using reporting software to “tag” reasons for calls. Continuing to draw from that data, update the information available to customers to make it relevant for new circumstances. For example, your IVR introduction may have provided information about delivery timeframes in December. Now, it may be more relevant to provide details about your return policy.

  • Make the time with the agent productive.

As soon as possible after a call is received by the telephone system, let the customer know what information they will need on-hand when talking with an agent, such as the date of purchase or make and model number of a product. This approach reduces the number of customers who wait in a queue, only to find out that they need to call back because they don’t have enough information to complete a transaction. (Don’t forget to keep an eye on real-time statistics in your call center. You may want to adjust the acceptable length of time that calls wait in queues in order to answer calls more quickly.)

  • Give agents the authority to deal with issues, as appropriate for their individual skills and experience.

No matter how hard you try to please your customers, some customers will have unreasonable expectations about what you should do for them. Make sure that agents understand what authority they have to offer solutions to customers and be clear about when they should contact their managers for input on difficult situations.

Look at issue-resolution as an opportunity to increase the loyalty of customer for your business. A really positive issue-resolution experience shows your customers that you’ll honor your customer satisfaction policies without hassle. Not only will those customers come to you first for future purchases, they may even recommend you to others.

Next month, we’ll talk about how you can use the data you’ve gathered over the last few months to plan for future call volume peaks and for changes in your business that affect call center forecasting.

See you next month.

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Posted in Call Center Operations, Customer Relationship Management, Software

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