When it comes to meeting and exceeding your customers’ expectations, First Contact Resolution ( FCR) hits the ball out of the park. It’s important to balance this metric, however, with others in its category. By focusing on your Service Level and Response time metrics, you will be able to ensure your customers are achieving the highest level of satisfaction. If your agents are able to pick up that call or chat quickly and actually resolve the concern on the first go around, your customers will think they’ve died and gone to heaven. Raising the bar in the customer service department is not as hard as it seems!
In previous posts, FCR has been discussed as one of the trickiest, but most useful, metrics to measure customer satisfaction. Another metric that provides a heavy impact on customer satisfaction is the service level of the support center. The service level can be measured by tracking what percentage of calls is answered within a certain amount of seconds. This metric can vary dramatically based on your company’s particular circumstances and goals, so it’s also important to measure this with your unique set of limitations and advantages in mind, including number factors like budget, business goals, channel selection, and customer expectation.
For a quick example, your service center could answer 80% of calls within 30 seconds. This number will change drastically when applied to the expectations of a separate channel, as e-mail service levels could be closer to 80% of e-mails being answered within 5 hours. It’s all a matter of context.
Although Service Level and Response Time metrics have similar goals, they are surprisingly not the same thing. With response time you get to include your company’s goals for the end-game of customer service: how long does it take for 100% of the calls to be answered? Keeping an eye on your company’s response time can help you reign in those outliers, like seemingly irresolvable contacts or issues that get re-opened again and again.
Metrics like Service Level and Response time will keep your company in check from going off the deep end with placing importance on the flashy metrics like FCR. First Contact Resolutions are a huge factor in monitoring the success of your customer service department, but make sure you take it with a grain of salt like the two above-mentioned metrics to get the most out of your number-crunching.