How do you measure First Call Resolution?

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Posted Thu 19 July 2007 @ 9:24 a.m. by Sarah Putt

First Call Resolution might be the most important metric, but how do you measure it when your contact centre isn’t set up to complete every transaction?

That’s the query from one contact centre manager at a national financial organisation with multiple branches. Here’s her dilemma:

“We complete 70% of the functions that a branch does except for specialized investments and lending etc. These calls have to go through to the branch or specialist to deal with as they can’t be handled in our contact centre (yet). This distorts our call resolution figures and we are sitting at 51% of calls completed and managed within the contact centre.

The average caller doesn’t need to ring us back as our error rate in the contact centre is very low. We are measuring the support we offer the branches and ensuring we transfer as little calls as to them as possible. But to me this is not really call resolution.”

What this manager would like to know is:

In this situation, what is a realistic FCR percentage to strive for?

Also, is there an industry term for the branch support her contact centre offers as this will assist her in researching the topic?

Please post your comments below.

Categories: Benchmarking | Leadership

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5 comments

• Kathy says:

  Why don't you take those calls out of the equation first and then measure your performance on the actual number of calls that do fit your FCR spec.

  Added: 20 July 2007, 1:48 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• wokky says:

  I have a similar situation, where the business rule(s) dictate that certain enquiry streams and/or types must go to the respective team concerned. I exclude these from my FCR stats, and therefore get a true reflection of the controllable FCR I deliver. To do this, you have to be able to qualify (tag) those call types and exclude them entirely from your FCR stats (or even include them as "resolved" - after all - you have given the required business response to that enquiry based on the rules applied to your contact centre) This will also allow you to highlight deficiencies in business process, whether that be business rules or system constraints, and provide this valuable customer and business intelligence to senior levels to define and prioritise process improvement programs. This can also be used to define deficiencies in knowledge based processes, where other business units do not provide the CC with quality, relevant, timely knowledge (information, training, FAQ's etc) - you also tag these calls, e.g. "transferred - not in Knowledge Base" - and not only exclude these calls from your (now) controllable FCR, but report them across the business in an improvement cycle process. The value in doing this is that it transfers the ownership of the solution to the business unit concerned, not yourself. (i.e. it shows their work volume going up due to lack of information, but your FCR is not affected). e.g. if only a branch can access a certain screen in a system, calls therefore must be transferred, the system constrains your raw FCR, so define a call type for this, and tag the calls as "Transferred - unable to access screen X" - and mark this as either excluded from FCR or as "resolved". This will give you volume of calls, and therefore costs involved in not fixing it. i have seen dramatic shifts in peoples thinking since implementing this model, as the ownership of the solution transfers to the teams concerned, and the demonstration of what work you can potentially "releive" them of by raising you FCR becomes quite stark. Gaps and deficiencies in people, processes, or systems also become very visible, allowing to identify a raft of improvments, from training, knowledge transfer, system enhancements, or business process remodelling. The reporting is rich, quantitative, and transparent. It also allows you to demontrate the true value of your team, as you are only measuring yourself against what *you* control. If you opt for a "raw FCR" of a lower percentage to accomodate the business deficiencies (inherent in any organisation), not only do you hide the problem, but you also indirectly accept ownership of it - there's no direct incentive for any other team to fix the real issue(s) at hand (as it's only your KPI's that this is measured against). I guess its a case of sometimes you need to pass the monkey . . . . .

  Added: 20 July 2007, 2:08 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Isabella says:

  While FCR is a veryimportant metric for most contact centres and appears to be 'the in metric' to measure, it may not be the most important for your contact centre. What does the broader business want the contact centre to deliver? Does the SMT know that your team are unable to help with 30% of enquiries because the business wants another part of the business to answer these queries OR do they want your team trained? Its their call, as long as you keep them informed and deliver the KPI's agreed. 1st Call Resolution may simply not be a key metric for your business unit.

  Added: 20 July 2007, 4:16 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Ian from COPC Inc says:

  The best way to measure FCR is to ask the customer in your customer satisfaction surveys how many times they needed to contact you to get a solution to their problem. Regarding FCR targets, these vary from industry to industry and product to product.

  Added: 3 August 2007, 6:55 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Ted Hopton says:

  Actually measuring FCR is, indeed, a tremendous challenge. I wrote about this recently in my blog: "First Call Resolution: Great Principle, Hard to Apply" Sad to say, there are problems with pretty much any way you choose to measure FCR. You can see a nice table of the pros and cons in my blog post, developed by Donna Fluss for her article about FCR in ICMI's Customer Management Insight magazine.

  Added: 7 February 2008, 8:10 a.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

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