Looking at the “C” in FCR

Read­ing up on call cen­ter met­rics, you will most likely encounter the acronym FCR, which stands for First Call Res­o­lu­tion. FCR scores track if cus­tomers’ needs were prop­erly addressed the first time they call. Of all the met­rics used by call cen­ters to mea­sure per­for­mance, the FCR sits high on the list of the most important.

For an agent who takes dozens of calls an hour, for sev­eral hours, day in and day out, it is easy to sound like a voice record­ing, which ulti­mately dehu­man­izes the entire customer-agent com­mu­ni­ca­tion process. So, it’s impor­tant to look at the call, the C in FCR, and why it hap­pens in the first place.

Below are some things that you might be over­look­ing on that cus­tomer call…

…and why you should always remem­ber that a call cen­ter exists because of it.

1. There is a per­son on the other end of the con­tact line who needs help, and she needs another per­son to respond to her concern/s. Yes, pre­pared scripts for com­mon, usual or recur­ring con­cerns save time and resources. But if effi­ciency and cost are the only con­sid­er­a­tions, why put up a con­tact cen­ter in the first place? Pri­or­ity num­ber one should be about estab­lish­ing the ideal cus­tomer expe­ri­ence.A sim­ple “Hi, this is Jodi how may I help you today?” may seem like a per­func­tory open­ing line for many agents but to a cus­tomer who made that call, a sin­cere greet­ing and intro­duc­tion can set the tone of the whole encounter. In this day and age of dig­i­tal and imper­sonal, sin­cer­ity is still impor­tant.
2. That per­son on the other end of the con­tact line is call­ing with legit­i­mate con­cerns. You may have heard them dozens of times; for this cus­tomer, this is prob­a­bly the first time he’s hav­ing such con­cerns. How many times does an agent lose patience or dis­miss a call as a nui­sance out of the assump­tion that the fel­low at the other end is not doing what, to the call cen­ter agent, would be the obvi­ous first steps to get­ting help? There is hardly any infor­ma­tion that you can’t find online. But not every­one is cre­ated the same and not every­one has the incli­na­tion to do things by them­selves when they need help. So if a per­son makes that call, real­ize the call is impor­tant enough for him to make the extra effort of ask­ing you.
3. That per­son on the other end of the con­tact line expects you to have the answers. When the cus­tomer asks, the agent bet­ter know the answers. There is noth­ing more frus­trat­ing than being forced to lis­ten to some ele­va­tor music while being put on hold for min­utes, or being tossed around because the guy who took the call doesn’t know what to do.

Along with com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills, com­pe­tence is equally impor­tant in the whole process.

It is always impor­tant to go back to the basics and reori­ent your think­ing to that of the cus­tomer that you seek to sat­isfy. Only when you look at that “call” in First Call Res­o­lu­tion more closely can you actu­ally look at the ways you can improve your FCR scores. Resolv­ing a cus­tomer ser­vice call on the first effort is a good thing. Con­stantly review­ing prac­tices, cus­tomer key words, fre­quently asked ques­tions, etc, that set you up to assist in that res­o­lu­tion, helps your com­pany be a suc­cess­ful cus­tomer ser­vice orga­ni­za­tion.