Let’s face it; time is money.
When you reach out to an organization for help, whether it be to learn about pricing, get IT support, or process a return, chances are you’re looking for a quick solution.
Businesses looking to maintain customer loyalty and trust throughout their customer experience will have to provide quick and adequate solutions or risk losing customers to a competitor. Hopefully, problems can be solved with one interaction, within one phone call.
Read on to learn more about what first call resolution is, why it’s important, and how to overcome challenges to improve it.
First call resolution, also known as first contact resolution, is when a customer calls a company with a question or problem and the agent handling the call is able to communicate clearly with the customer and resolve or make positive changes for that customer within the first interaction.
By the end of that interaction, any problems the customer had should be solved. First call resolution increases customer satisfaction and builds trust and confidence in that customer to call the company again when they face an issue in the future.
First call resolution can have a significant impact on the customer journey and can truly make or break a business. Research shows that if a customer trusts a brand, they are 62% more likely to stay loyal and continue doing business with that brand.
Call resolution is a broad metric that measures the total amount of resolved customer requests. First call resolution goes deeper to measure the amount of customer requests that were resolved during the first interaction.
This metric can help businesses make many decisions, especially if many requests coming in are similar. If this is the case, your team can work on solutions to prevent the same request in the future. For example, if there is a point in the onboarding process where clients get stuck, you can create training resources to counteract this.
In addition, understanding your first call resolution can help you identify any gaps in your service offerings, dive deeper into your overall customer satisfaction, or understand where your agent’s knowledge or skills to solve problems may fall short and provide them with more training.
First call or first contact resolution is important to measure because it is a key indicator of overall customer satisfaction. Customers value a quick resolution to their issues rather than having to call a company numerous times or being passed off to multiple departments and agents to solve the same issue.
In fact, a whopping 93% of customers expect their issue to be resolved on the first call. Therefore, if you aren’t measuring or making efforts to improve your first call resolution rate, you are falling short of customer expectations and risk losing their business entirely.
A strong first call resolution also saves costs for both customers and the company they are calling. For every 1% improvement in first call resolution, companies reduce operating costs by 1%.
For customers, if they are able to get fast resolutions to issues with one single interaction, they are able to spend less time on the phone. For us at net2phone, this is particularly important. Our customers need more time to serve their own customers and focus on their own business goals. It is vital that when they contact us, they are able to connect with knowledgeable agents to get fast resolutions to their queries. The sooner they are off the phone with us, the sooner they can connect with their own clients.
We pride ourselves on our own first resolution rate of 95% and strive to go above and beyond this every day.
Measuring first call resolution is quite simple, as long as you know your total number of customer calls received and your total number of customer issues resolved in one single interaction.
To calculate your FCR, divide your total number of customer issues resolved in a single call (or interaction) by the total number of tickets received within the same time frame and multiply that number by 100. You may want to break this down by day, week, month, quarter, etc. You can also break this down by department or even agent to get a full picture.
There are several challenges or barriers for improving first call resolution. Here are some of the most common:
While there is no fast track to improve your first call resolution overnight, there are several best practices that will give you and your team a fighting chance.
Here are 6 of our top suggestions to improve your first call resolution rate.
Empowering our support agents by providing them with the right knowledge and giving them the confidence to handle complex issues is key to improving first call resolution. It’s also important to promote knowledge sharing within teams and between departments so that agents gain more experience in handling complex issues when they arise.
Communication is key with our customers and it goes a long way when it comes to streamlining processes. We need to ensure we understand an issue properly to present the right solution. This is especially important when working with a company that may sell highly technical products.
On our team, when we need to present resolutions, We train our agents to ask our clients the right questions in order to understand what the issue is. We can then determine if there is a problem on our side or if the issue is external, like an internet provider or router issue. By asking the right questions, we can troubleshoot all issues accordingly.
In addition, in situations where a client needs to be put on hold while a higher-tier customer support representative helps with a difficult case, it’s important for agents to continuously return to the call to refresh the hold time and let the customer know that we are still working on a solution.
Collecting feedback from our customers is imperative to improve your first call resolution over time. On our own team, we collect customer feedback through surveys. Whether results are good or bad, we learn something. By collecting feedback, you can also identify any patterns or common issues customers may face and work on creating a solution before the same issue occurs for another customer or training agents on how best to identify and resolve the issue.
Providing resources to help clients solve their own issues may help cut down on overall calls made to support teams, which can in turn improve first call resolution. Consider sharing answers to frequently asked questions (such as the ones you collect in your surveys) on your website, training resources, how-to guides, and more. net2phone actually holds regular webinars to help with the onboarding process, go through common questions, and more.
Similar to providing self-serve resources, using chatbots to manage FAQs and respond to common queries can cut down on overall calls to your support team. In fact, virtual assistants reduce inquiries across calls, chats, and emails by 70%, saving companies money by reducing customer service costs by up to 30%. By offloading common questions to chatbots, agents can focus their efforts and attention on more complex issues.
Advanced contact center solutions can help your team streamline interactions to answer customer queries quickly and efficiently. For example, net2phone’s uContact provides a single dashboard view of each customer. Agents can pull up all client information immediately, before even answering a call to prepare beforehand. The single view can show all previous interactions with the client as well as product or add-ons a client has, which will potentially provide insights into the current issue. This leads to a better customer experience and questions getting answered quickly.
In addition, our net2phone AI tool is evolving to help customers even more. net2phone AI transcribes calls to help agents focus more on conversations rather than taking notes. We are currently testing additional features that will send snippets of calls directly to contact center supervisors to flag requests that may need escalation and note if the problem was resolved or if the customer needs more help.
The bottom line is that first call resolution directly correlates with customer satisfaction. Your customers are more likely to continue doing business with you if the interactions they’ve had with you are positive. Getting a fast resolution to any issues a customer may have goes to the top of the list in shaping a positive customer experience.
If you’re looking to elevate your Customer Support and offer white-glove, five-star experiences for your customers, improving first call resolution is just the tip of the iceberg.
Modern, innovative business communication solutions and tools allow for seamless support, agent productivity, and streamlined operations.
Check out net2phone’s solutions for customer support to take your team to the next level!