How to Improve First Call Resolution

When a customer calls your company's support line, your goal should be to resolve their issue or concern as quickly as possible. This is known as "first call resolution" (FCR), or sometimes "first contact resolution."

When handled effectively, a first call can inspire trust, excitement, and brand loyalty. When handled ineffectively, you can kiss your customer’s good experience with your brand goodbye.

For those reasons, first-contact resolutions (or FCR) should be a high priority for your brand. But what does FCR look like and how exactly do you improve it?

What is first call resolution (FCR)?

FCR is a key metric for measuring the effectiveness of your customer service department. A high first call resolution rate indicates that customers are getting the help they need from your company without having to contact you again.

FCR is one of the most valuable KPIs to measure for your business because of how much it can improve the experience for customers. In practice, FCR might look like an agent fixing an issue with an account, answering customer questions, or walking a customer through a process in a single interaction over the phone. 

A successful first-contact resolution means your customer is not contacting you again for continued support on the same issue, nor are they bouncing around from representative to representative. 

Why does first contact resolution matter? 

When a customer calls into a business, they're rarely hoping to share a glowing review. Most often, they call because they are frustrated or because they’ve found some kind of friction in the customer journey. Maybe they’re confused by information on a business’ website, they have a question about their flight, or they’ve had an issue with a shipment. There are plenty of possible pain points. 

A customer with a problem is an opportunity, but it's also a risk. If communication with your brand is slow, difficult, or frustrating, further compounding that customer’s frustrations, you risk losing that customer and their business for good. 

First-contact resolution prevents this scenario and ultimately improves customer happiness and loyalty. In fact, only 3% of customers are likely to take their business elsewhere if you’re able to resolve their concerns with first contact. That number jumps to a whopping 38% if it takes a customer a second call to get a resolution. 

How do you improve first-contact resolution? 

Brands may find the idea of improving their FCR overwhelming and intimidating, especially if they don’t have a large support staff, they have inexperienced agents answering calls, or call volume is too high.

The key to to improving first contact resolution comes down to: 

• Diversifying your customer service channels
• Automating customer support 
• Providing context across the customer journey
• Using data to improve the experience

Tip 1: Diversify your customer service channels 

Sometimes a small issue becomes a multi-call issue simply because calling is the only way your customers know how to contact you, or they believe it's the fastest way to get help. This can really overwhelm your phone lines and your agents. 

Diversifying the kinds of customer service channels you offer allows customers to have accessible service whenever they need it and get answers quickly without necessarily having to speak on the phone with an agent. 

For example, in addition to phone calls, customers may be able to resolve queries via SMS, live chat, a website chatbot with automated responses for simple questions, and even screenshots or video messaging so the agent handling the ticket is more equipped to resolve it quickly. 

Tip 2: Incorporate automation

Automation can support customer service across the entire experience without taking away from the valuable work your agents are already doing. 

In addition to chatbots, brands can incorporate tools like IVR (or an interactive voice response) into their support menu that collect valuable information about the issue and direct customers to either the best agent to address their query or helpful automated responses. These automated responses can also do anything from informing customers about business operating hours to providing detailed account information. 

IVR automation provides customers with possible solutions before they ever speak to a representative, and if they do need to escalate a conversation to a representative, that option is easily available. 

Automation can improve a brand’s FCR by allowing virtual agents to take on more mundane tasks that tie up human agents so that human agents can provide better service for more complicated queries. It can also collect and record useful data about your customer that can be used to further personalize their experience. 

Tip 3: Provide context across the customer journey

One of the biggest reasons why customer queries aren’t handled in one call is because agents simply don’t have enough context to effectively address them. The nature of phone communication can make resolutions trickier to come by. 

Advanced contact center platforms can also enable agents to collect information about a customer before they even speak to them, including the reason for their call, what language the customer speaks, and context for every conversation customers have previously had via chatbot, SMS, email and other communication channels.

This means that instead of spending valuable time putting a customer on hold to look up their information, agents are ready right when they pick up to provide customers with solutions. 

Tip 4: Use data to improve the customer experience

Improved first call resolution ultimately comes down to having the best tools for the job.

With a powerful CCaaS platform like UJET, companies like yours get significantly more insights about their customers’ behavior and interactions.

That data can be leveraged to improve the customer experience today and find out what specifically is contributing to issues like call abandonment so that the experience is improved immediately rather than months down the road. 

This data can also be used to train your agents so that they’re confident and capable of providing customers with the most efficient resolutions possible. 

Learn more about how to measure and improve first contact resolution by downloading the Inner Circle's Guide to First Contact Resolution.