This FAQ content delivers a complete understanding of the concept of “First Call Resolution” or FCR. You will gain interesting insights on the questions related to FCR, which will help you to navigate a better understanding of customer inquiries and solutions to resolve their complaints in a single interaction.
What is First Call Resolution (FCR) in the Contact Center?
First call resolution, also known as FCR or first contact resolution- is the performance metric of customer interaction, which is resolved by agents on the first attempt. FCR is all about answering and resolving customer queries at their initial phone call without any requirement for follow-up. Accomplishing a high FCR rate is important for better customer satisfaction and overall minimizing the call volume.
Right First Time (RFT) is another term for first contact resolution (FCR).
First-call resolution represents the performance and effectiveness of your contact center by providing instant and satisfactory resolutions to customers’ queries. A successful and outstanding First-call resolution doesn’t require follow-up or escalations. FCR is regarded as one of the most important call-centric metrics.
Why is FCR crucial?
FCR plays a dynamic role in customer support. It upgrades customer satisfaction levels, boosts efficiency in operational activities along with amplifying customer experience.
As per Forrester’s study, 34% of CX leaders utilized FCR to state their organization’s customer service performance.
But do you ever wonder why this particular metric is considered the KING of all call center metrics? Let’s study a few reasons behind its importance in all metrics;
FCR narrows down the operational costs. As we know labor costs go up to more than $1 for a few minutes of conversation. Resolving the issue in the very first attempt and eliminating the need for follow-up will improve productivity and thus reduce costs and save time and money.
Many tasks are to be performed by agents like handling customers, resolving their problems, and so on. But, prioritization of tasks will efficiently help you to deal with customers
Lastly, FCR helps businesses to gain valuable insights which allows them to make necessary adjustments and changes to prevent it from upcoming calls. By deeply analyzing the core reasons behind the repetition of calls, companies can easily identify the areas for improvements in their process.
Tips to Improve First Call Resolution?
We have mentioned a few common tips that can be employed to enhance the ability to resolve an issue at the very first call. Which aims to eliminate the need for follow-up and better the customer experience and satisfaction.
#1 Tip:
Delighty deal with customer emotions. It’s time to invest in agent training and provide communication skills to your contact center agents. Customers feel blissful when they are acknowledged and valued in every interaction. So it’s important to maintain the situation and smoothly deal with their emotions and offer meaningful backend.
#2 Tip:
Automate the call to make it trouble-free. To improve the FCR rate it’s good to automate the call handling process. To maintain smart and easy workflows in your call center, it’s better to use the IVR system to route incoming customer calls to specific field agents.
#3 Tip:
Try to figure out problems and quickly resolve them. There are a lot of issues that are not solved in the first attempt. It’s necessary to identify these issues and instantly offering them solutions will improve your resolution rate as well as customer satisfaction.
#4 Tip:
Venture for evaluating the FCR performance. Reviewing metrics regularly will provide you with valuable insights. Omnichannel support offers you an effortless experience in multiple interactions. It’s become easy when agents can view and access all customer details across different channels- all in one place which further leads to faster resolution times.
What is a good FCR?
Good first call resolution is the percentage of successfully resolved number of customer inquiries at the initial phone call. Having a good FCR justifies that your contact center has access to a higher level of customer service and thereby fosters customer loyalty and retention.
Several surveys have indicated that a good first-call resolution rate ranges between 70% to 75%. This simply signifies that around 25% are the repetition calls about the same problem. But for better results, agents should set their FCR rate goal to more than 80%. The higher your FCR rate, the better the result. Moreover, measures for FCR rate depend on your product or service complications.
Conclusion
In the end, gaining knowledge on this useful metric feels like living on the top level of the world! Well, from the customer perspective, FCR is a must and it’s considered as a key metric for customer service operations. To upgrade one more level of resolution, FCR (First Call Resolution ) is a useful metric among all others.