In today’s economic climate most of us are trying to keep our operational costs to a minimum, while trying to balance adequate service levels. Normally, when you cut costs there is a trade off with the level of service that you can offer. However, in call centres or customer service teams, there is something that you can measure and improve on which will:
- Help you save money with running your call centre or customer service team;
- Give you many more happy customers; and
- Make your staff happier to be at work
Often companies around New Zealand don’t give too much thought to measuring and improving their customer services. If they were going to investigate anything at all it should be FCR – First Call Resolution.
What is FCR?
I want to keep this light and easy to understand. There are different definitions for FCR, but I like to think of it as getting it right the first time. This means when a customer calls you with an issue you solve it in one phone call.
Why is this important?
Every time a customer has to call your company back because their issue wasn’t resolved the first or second time, those second and third calls cost you a lot of money. Let’s look at some facts and figures.
- An FCR of 68% is average in the USA – NZ might be a little lower
- This means 32% of customers have to call back – reduce this and you reduce your running costs enormously
- FCR is directly related to customer satisfaction – 1% increase in FCR will get you a 1% increase in customer satisfaction
- The customer representatives who have to take the second and third calls from frustrated customers find it harder to enjoy their job – get FCR right and your staff are happier – or not getting it right causes unnecessary stress
- About 15% of customers who don’t get a resolution are likely to go to a competitor, this will have a big impact on your business
- The best person to tell you if they are happy with the solution is THE CUSTOMER – internal measures of FCR tend to be inflated or biased compared to external measures (external means that the customer told you they were happy)
What can you do?
There are different ways that you can measure FCR. It can be turned into a bit of a science of customer satisfaction. I won’t get into detail, but we do have the tools with our business voice recording products to help you achieve this in a user friendly reporting and automatic fashion. Look into these products if you have 16 or more customer service representatives. If you have less staff than this, use the simple voice recorders and perform some quality monitoring of the calls.
What can you do that is essentially free to improve FCR?
From the facts above we can see that getting it right for the customer the first time is a really good thing to do. Once your customer service representative thinks that they have solved the issue get them to ask the customer – Did I solve the problem for you today?
The answer will tell you if you still have some work to do.
Customer Answer: “Yes”
Staff Member: “Great, enjoy your day I am happy I could help you.”
Customer Answer: “No” or hesitation
Staff Member: “Thanks for telling me, can you please explain how else I can be of help out and I’ll do my best to find a solution?”
This is so simple it’s beautiful. Once you do this the next step is to find a way to work out how often you get it right the first time. Measure your FCR from the customer’s point of view. If you want to know more about measuring FCR, contact Cackle Telecommunications on Free Call 0508 222 553
In today’s economic climate most of us are trying to keep our operational costs to a minimum, while trying to balance adequate service levels. Normally, when you cut costs there is a trade off with the level of service that you can offer.
