We have all had what most of us call “one of those days.”
You know the kind of day where everything goes wrong from the minute your alarm goes off in the morning? Or rather doesn’t go off which ends up being the catalyst for the rest of the waking nightmare. The rest of the morning includes missing breakfast, spilling scalding hot coffee all over your brand new white shirt that cost a fortune, a flat tire even though you just replaced your tires, then you finally get to work and the boss yells at you for being late!
Everything rolls down hill and over the cliff, and there you stand at the summit listening to echoing squeal of your day falling to pieces. After all that mess, you don’t want to call customer service about something that broke, waiting forty-five minutes for the next available agent only to be passed around like a football moving towards the end-zone. None of us enjoys that experience, so why do we in the business community waste our customers’ precious time by putting them through it?
The best avenue to customer satisfaction in any instance is first-call resolution. First-call resolution deals strictly with live phone calls which are resolved with the first agent, so the customer isn’t passed around like a football.
A couple of ways to measure it:
- the agent checks a box after the call saying that the issue was resolved, or
- the customer gives a glowing review in a post-service survey.
A high first-call resolution rate is often an indicator of how well a company trains and educates their agents. A business that spends more time training their call-center and help desk employees will have a higher rate of first-call resolution along with a higher rate of customer retention.
Having a low FCR places your company at risk for losing customers, and if a customer has been passed around so much or has called back enough times that they can recite their story word for word in their sleep, more than likely that customer has already chosen to defect to another company the minute that their issue is resolved with yours.
No one likes making calls to customer service because they expect the worst, especially if it has been “one of those days.” When your company gets those calls, be the one who salvages the customer’s day by fixing it right the first time.