Is your organization looking to reduce call center expense in an adverse economy?  FCR can give your organization insight into broken technical processes and fractured training regimens in order to realign both people and processes.

As with many contact center metrics, First Call Resolution cannot be understood without context.   FCR is a single metric among several operational metrics that combine to create a key measure of customer satisfaction.  Take the following, for example.  Say a customer calls into a contact center to request a rebate on an item just purchased.  The call center agent efficiently grabs the individual's mailing information and fires off a task through the fulfillment system requesting that a rebate packet to be sent to the customer.  By industry standards, this agent completed his or her responsibility, and would have received a high FCR score on the call.  Is this mailing request the only data point that should go into First Call Resolution scoresDoes this high FCR score reflect the customer's experience?  Was this the first, second or third time a rebate was requested?  Should the customer have instead received rebate information at the time of purchase that would have made this call unnecessary?  What if this operation is receiving hundreds of these calls per day?  Per month?  Does this represent a significant number of calls for the operation?  And what does this say about how a product is being sold in channel stores, or about how the manufacturer is packaging merchandise?  Or what if an internal process is disrupted and the rebate package never actually reaches the customer?  Inevitably after several weeks of checking the mail, the customer will call back into the call center to request the rebate packet yet again.  Is this an isolated incident, or does this happen a lot?  As you might imagine, this iterative process can have significant cost implications across the board. 

So the million dollar question is, if your operation can't measure all these individual agents and processes, how can you expect to manage FCR?  This sort of disjointed process can lead to customer dissatisfaction, or worse, customer churn. 

So how should First Call Resolution be measured?  FCR rates can be influenced by many different touch points.  So the key to truly measuring FCR is having visibility into data channels across the organization - giving organizations the ability to incorporate data from a variety of sources, including CRM, IVR, and quality monitoring systems, to triangulate the data points needed to get an accurate, meaningful measure of FCR, and to link tactical performance management goals to strategic FCR initiatives.  

The original agent in this example fulfilled his or her duties during that call - gathering customer information and sending off a request for a rebate packet to be mailed - but in many people- and technology-intensive organizations, process breakdowns, such as the one in the example, often have nothing to do with individuals.  To combat this issue, performance management applications arm complex, multi-faced organizations with analytical insight into their business processes, enabling them to incorporate data from both people and processes spread across the organization, to produce a measure of FCR accurate to that particular organization. 

Having a 90% FCR rate doesn't necessarily mean that all your organization's issues are resolved.  Rather FCR is the X-Ray that offers insight into your organization's broken bones - the disjointed processes and training gaps that become organizational cost burdens and hinder customer satisfaction.