First Call Resolution: It’s Not Just for the Phones

First call resolution (FCR) is one of the key metrics that companies use to judge their success and guide the actions. FCR is a major factor in the customer service department because it gives your agents a goal to work towards and helps to speed along the process of customer support — and every customer knows, fast service is ideal. Helping your team improve on their FCR rates is often only considered in the realm of phone-based customer care; after all, “call” is in the title. However, all other channels of support should keep this same metric in mind if you want to truly have a well-oiled service machine on your side.

Achieving high FCR levels on emails and live chat channels is similar to achieving them from the phone standpoint, but there are a few other, different advantages available to your employees from these channels that are not present when you have an agent on the phone.

A huge advantage is that your team will be able to solicit support from each other. With phone-based support, you can have four people working hard in the same room, but completely separate from each other. With web-based customer service methods, those four people will be able to openly rely on each other, asking questions and checking methods and encouraging each other. This kind of workplace synergy has more positive effects than just speed of service, but picking up the pace is definitely one of the outcomes.

One of the other features your team will need in order to increase their FCR rates is a broad, all-encompassing knowledge base software setup available for access at all times. This knowledge base should become a sort of living document among your team, too, so that members with new or different experiences can add their input and provide an ever-growing wealth of information for others to search. PhaseWare’s KB software has some of the best searching tools around. With natural language searching and result ranking capabilities, the answer will be obvious and available within just a few seconds of keying in the query.

Communication between staff and management is also an incredibly important factor in improving FCR rates. If everyone is on the same page, agents will be able to offer the right answer quickly and consistently because the answers will already have been given to them. This comes into play with trending issues and common service requests — if your team knows what’s coming before it comes, their answers will be quick and accurate. PhaseWare’s Dashboards features are fantastic for keeping everyone in the know. Management has the ability to curate employees’ home screens at will, and update the team of any changes or necessary information instantaneously.

PhaseWare DashboardsPhaseWare’s Dashboards

First call resolution is intrinsically linked with company success and a good customer support department. With the right software and support, your team should be able to achieve only better and better rates as your business continues to grow!

Is your software holding your team back? Register for a free trail of our amazing fleet of products and see how PhaseWare can get you back on track. 

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