First Contact Resolution refers to the complete & final resolution of a customer’s predicament during the first time they initiate a support session, thus, removing their need to contact you again. FCR is a customer-oriented metric that is directly linked to your customers’ happiness proportion and therefore, plays a critical role to increase your customer satisfaction & retention ratios, respectively. Even though in the present-day, an overwhelming majority of customers demand a prompt response to their queries, in comparison to FCR, the latter beats the former. This indicates that a faster response time can still result in average CSAT ratio, primarily because you are unable to address customer issues properly and your prompt responses to customer queries are not helping either.

No matter which metrics you want to calculate, the initial step is to select a particular time-period in which you want to evaluate your performance. This timeperiod can represent anything from normal seasons to identify the average efficiency ratio of your support start to holiday seasons when the chat load is immense to determine the efficiency of your support agents in high-traffic situations.

Furthermore, you can use this metric to identify whether you require more workforce in situations like holiday seasons or promotional events by comparing the performance of your support agents FCR in high-traffic events to their normal FCR ratio.

After a particular time-frame is selected the next two steps are to gather data and clean data by selecting exclusion criteria based on elements, such as wrong calls, repeat calls, or internal communication. Afterwards, you can calculate your FCR ratio by using following formula:

Apart from calculating the general FCR ratio of your support agents, you can segment it based on customer queries as well. For instance, FCR ratio can be calculated for the individual, marketing queries, billing queries, sales queries, or technical support queries etc.

Likewise, due to this sort of segmentation, you would be able to calculate FCR ratio based on customer queries, which in response would allow you to generate a more in-depth performance report on your support agents’ productivity. Furthermore, you can subsequently achieve better results by devising adequate strategies based on your support staff’s performance in terms of handling different customer queries.

First Contact Resolution is directly linked to your Customers Happiness proportion, for instance, if you are able to resolve a customer’s issue in the first contact, thus eliminating their need to contact you again to address the same issue, they will surely be satisfied and as a result, their happiness percentage will increase.

Meanwhile, on the other hand, if a customer had to contact you several times before their issue is finally resolved adequately. Then in such scenario, not only their satisfaction proportion would decrease but it is also highly likely that such customers would be hesitant to contact your Customer Service Centre again in case of any predicament. Furthermore, repetition of similar scenarios in the future may also result in silently churning customers, which in return would greatly affect your yearly revenue as well as your Referral Cultivation Ratio.

In short, FCR drives customer satisfaction (CSAT). Likewise, better FCR ratio represents superior CSAT percentage & poor FCR ratio signifies reduced CSAT percentage.

With our carefully devised Customer Service methodologies and routinely evaluated performance, out of all 1000 interactions per day, we are able to successfully resolve 800 of them (on average) in the First Contact, resulting in an enhanced Customer Experience and a satisfied consumer-base, respectively. This makes our FCR ratio 80%, on average.

The initial step is to streamline our customer service process. Primarily, this is achieved by shifting our focus towards the customers, i.e. rather than an agent closing a customer issue on their own, we consider an issue closed only after receiving confirmation from the customers that their predicament has been resolved completely. This approach not only increases the productivity of our support agents but increase customer satisfaction ratio as well. Mostly, because an issue closed by the support agent before any kind of confirmation from the customer may be re-opened in the future because the customer is not yet satisfied with the provided solution, which in result would signify dissatisfied customers & further usage of Contact Centre resources.

By considering issues that are closed by the customers we eliminate all such scenarios. Rather than focusing on providing prompt responses to customer queries, we focus on providing relevant responses that help us achieve better FCR ratio and subsequently result in greater customer satisfaction percentage.

Lastly, we persistently measure our support agents’ performance in terms of First Contact Resolution in normal seasons as well as in promotional events and holiday seasons, to always offer consistent Support Services to our customers. Therefore, in case, where the FCR ratio of any of our support agents decreases, the careful analysis process allows us to determine the cause so that we can take appropriate measures to maintain first-class support services.

Contemporary Age has resulted in several remarkable tools & techniques that have made the measurement of success proportion regardless of your business’s nature or model relatively easy. Likewise, where high-end metrics like Conversion Ratio, Customer Satisfaction Ratio, and Customer Retention Ratio are held in high regards to measure one’s performance, the necessity of granular measures to determine & subsequently improve your customers’ happiness percentage cannot be undermined as well.

We believe this because we understand its importance. In fact, just a 1% improvement in your First Contact Resolution ratio represents a 1% improvement in your Customer Satisfaction ratio, which signifies retained customers & increased business opportunities in the near-future.

In conclusion, categorically, popular metrics like Customer Satisfaction, Retention, and Conversion ratios are critical to measuring your performance. However, they only provide a bird’s-eye view of your performance. To understand exactly where support agents performed in accordance to your expectations & where they are lacking so that you can take appropriate measures to increase your Customer Service Centre’s efficiency, you have to use targeted metrics like First Contact Resolution. FCR provide you with the feasibility to analyze a single aspect of your support agents comprehensively to competently measure & increase their productivity, by addressing their issues, accordingly.