By Bhaskar Mishra, Head of Products, Mihup
•An estimated 82% of customers leave a business because of poor service experience
•Businesses that understand and promptly resolve a customer’s pain point, especially on the first contact itself, experience significantly higher customer retention and delight
Read between the lines above and it will become clear that First-Call Resolution (FCR) is a critical metric and indicator of superior customer experience. It is possible to assess customer delight delivered by agents at contact centres during the first conversation itself. A happy customer would gladly recommend your product and service to others. This is where organic brand promotion helps in increasing sales with lower marketing costs.
Agents must therefore understand the customer’s pain point, find the right answer or solution, and ensure that there is no need for further communication related to a specific problem. It sounds simple. However, most contact centre agents continue to flounder at it. Let’s take a look at ways to ensure your agents ace FCR.
The first and foremost step is to monitor everything. The conventional analytics process touches upon barely 2%-3% of conversations in contact centres. This has to be changed and enhanced by using advanced AI-driven speech analytics solutions that listens to every call, analyses every chat and ensures 100% understanding of the customer’s voice.
Further, the leadership team should take the following steps:
1. Setting clear goals – The agents should have a clear understanding of the FCR and other metrics as well as desired outcomes.
2. Training – Analysis will highlight the knowledge gap or other problem areas for agents. There must be an integrated training approach to hone their skills.
3. Continuous tracking – Every agent must be continuously monitored, and on all conversations.
4. Multi-point measurement – Sometimes contact centres focus too much on calls, leaving their chat and email responses to lag. A holistic approach must be adopted to ensure superior FCR irrespective of the channel.
5. Incentivize performance – Companies that incentivize FCR can encourage agents to pay greater attention to it.
6. Set the right customer expectations – Ever noticed when you book a cab or order food or groceries online through an app, the actual arrival of the cab or the order delivery takes longer than the estimated delivery/wait time shown?
Similarly, when one calls up or initiates a chat with any customer service department, more often than not the wait time turns out to be longer than estimated. In today’s fast-paced world when people expect instant and helpful support, such things are surely bound to hurt the CX. Make sure your customers are updated about the right average wait time, queue status, etc., estimated resolution time, etc.
Use Speech Analytics
As hinted above, speech analytics plays a critical role in improving FCR in modern contact centres. Companies using speech analytics experience 76% FCR whereas those that don’t average around 23% FCR.
Advanced AI-speech analytics tools record conversations, identify the callers accurately, and can correlate specific agent, subject matter, or caller-related issues. There is an integration of sentiment analysis to segregate happy, satisfied, unhappy, or angry callers. All these observations and insights enable the companies to address the underlying issues and prepare agents for the FCR of the same.
Benefits of Superior First Call Resolution
First Call Resolution helps in identifying problem areas and resolving them through the integration of tools, training, and process changes. Less recurring issues automatically lead to superior FCR and greater customer experience.
In a linguistically diverse country like India, a major challenge faced by contact centres is the diversity of languages and accents. More often than not, agents are not able to properly understand what the customer wanted to convey and fail to respond appropriately. By integrating speech analytics tools with multi-language and dialect capabilities, and contextual and sentimental analysis, these challenges can be effectively overcome.
When customers receive instant support in a language that they are comfortable with, they would be more at ease and trust the brand better. It will help to provide a superior customer experience and greater opportunities for revenue generation for the company.
Now that you have an idea about the importance & effects of FCR, ensure you do not lose any more customers whom you have acquired by spending millions of dollars!