Updated: June 17, 2024
The cheerful agent helped a customer set up her voice mail greeting. The customer was ready to end the call when the agent asked, "Do you ever need to set an out-of-office message?"
"As a matter of fact," said the customer, "I'm going on vacation in a few weeks."
It took an extra minute to walk through the out-of-office process, but it saved the customer from having to call again in a few weeks.
That's the power of first contact resolution:
Improved service: It saved the customer future hassle.
Reduced cost: It saved the company the cost of a future call.
It seems obvious that this should be tracked and measured, but it often isn't.
My advice might surprise you: I don't care if you measure first contact resolution or not. What really matters is two insights that can help you achieve the one-and-done nirvana.
But first, a little background.
What is first contact resolution?
First contact resolution (FCR) involves solving the customer's issue on the first contact so they don't have to contact you again.
That's what the agent did in the voice mail example—anticipated a future customer need and solved that problem on the same call so the customer didn't need to call back sometime later.
FCR can create an immensely better customer experience. It can also save your company a ton of money.
Let's say 100 customers call your company for support. Your FCR rate is 80 percent, which means you solve 80 out of those 100 issues (100 x 80%) on the first call.
Pretty good, right?
Well… It also means 20 of those 100 customers will need to call at least one more time to solve their issue. Some of those customers might need three or more calls to get a result.
Here’s a sample calculation of the call volume for those 100 initial calls:
100 first calls
x 80% FCR
80 issues handled on one call
100 first calls
-80 handled on one call
20 issues requiring 2+ calls
20 issues requiring 2+ calls
x 2.5 average calls to resolve
50 calls
80 calls
+50 calls
130 calls
In this example, failing to help the customer the first time increased call volume by 30 percent!
I know what you're thinking. "If Jeff's math holds up, it seems insane not to measure this, right?" The challenge is FCR is difficult to measure accurately.
Why is FCR so hard to measure?
There are a number of factors that make FCR very difficult to measure accurately. Here are just a few examples:
What counts as a repeat contact?
Can those repeat contacts be easily tracked?
How can you tell repeat contacts from contacts related to new issues?
Can you track contacts on the same issue over multiple channels?
Do you count self-service attempts or conversations with bots? (Customers do.)
Are escalations counted as a second contact?
Does a follow-up call or email count as a second contact or is it part of the same conversation?
A lot of executives get hung up on these questions. They don’t trust numbers that feel too squishy or convoluted. FCR isn't a precise metric, so they decide not to measure it.
The good news is whether or not you measure it, you can improve FCR if you have two insights:
What drives repeat contacts?
What behaviors prevent them?
What drives repeat contacts?
This insight can help you and your employees identify situations where additional contacts are more likely. Once you know about them, these drivers can be signals to take action.
For instance, the cheerful agent knew customers who needed help setting up their voice mail were likely to call back for help setting an out-of-office message. This insight prompted a proactive offer of assistance.
There are a few universal drivers that cause repeat contacts.
My research indicates 80 percent of Twitter complaints come from customers who are either waiting for a resolution or a response. So faster service will almost always reduce repeat contacts.
Be careful here.
One contact center gets an avalanche of customer emails. The repeat contact driver for the email agents is working too fast. Agents respond within the one hour standard, but frequently fail to careful read each email and understand what the customer is asking. This means it often takes three or more emails to resolve a customer’s issue.
Most drivers are probably specific to your organization.
Is there a particular product feature that confuses customers?
Do specific policies generate repeat contacts?
Is there a specific service that's unreliable?
You don't need a lot of rocket science to discover this insight.
One way to get actionable data is to ask your employees why customers are re-contacting your company. This can be a five minute exercise in a team huddle, where employees share what they've been hearing.
Try building a "top ten" list and then discussing ways to prevent a second contact. Make sure each agent can identify the top ten.
This leads us to the second insight you'll need.
What behaviors prevent repeat contacts?
The second insight is understanding the behaviors that help prevent repeat contacts from happening.
The right behaviors are sometimes obvious. Let's go back to the voice mail example.
Driver: setting an out-of-office message
Behavior: ask customer if they ever need an out-of-office message.
What about the email example where agents failed to fully read customer emails? The solution might seem obvious, but it wasn’t to the agents or their manager. That’s because the manager closely monitored productivity and little else.
Here’s the insight that would help:
Driver: working too fast and misunderstanding customers.
Behavior: take the time to understand what each customer is asking.
It can take a little more digging in other situations. You might even need to experiment with different approaches. Keep in mind the solution might span multiple channels or teams.
For example, I recently checked into a hotel and discovered the iron in my room was damaged. I called guest service and asked for a replacement iron, but it never came. So I called again a few hours later.
The hotel associate volunteered that the hotel's housekeeping department was changing shifts the first time I called, so my initial request was likely missed.
She clearly knew the driver behind multiple housekeeping requests, but she didn’t know what behavior would fix it. A quick meeting between the housekeeping and guest service departments might be required to "iron out" a way to prevent this issue from happening.
One quick fix for contact centers is to add “prevent repeat contacts” to the quality monitoring process. You don’t have to measure FCR to do this. You just need to know whether agents use the behaviors that are likely to prevent second contacts.
Take Action
This makes a great meeting or training topic to share with your team.
Ask your employees why customers have to contact us again. (Drivers)
Determine how to prevent repeat contacts in those situations. (Behaviors)
Focusing on FCR is one way companies can improve customer retention. You can get more ideas for winning and retaining customers from my book, The Guaranteed Customer Experience.