A multi-thousand seat Business Process Outsourcer (BPO) in the east has seen an increase in repeat calls for similar issues. After doing some
research and analysis, it was discovered agents were not properly trained in
handling specific types of customer interactions and this was leading to repeat
calls.
First Contact Resolution (FCR) is a common Key Performance Indicator (KPI) in contact centers.
Resolving customer issues on first
interaction is paramount to quality customer service, reduced costs and
ultimately an improved bottom line.
However, FCR is not easily measured. It's a common KPI but what defines a repeat call is not a static data element.
Every contact center is different. Every customer is different. Every
interaction is different.
How then can FCR be measured?
The BPO's customer service
department uses a workforce optimization solution (WFO) which gathers Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) statistics from their Unified Communications (UC) platform. Among the stats gathered include Agent State Changes and Computer Telephony Integrated (CTI) metadata for enhanced data points.
Armed with all this data, the system is capable of detecting repeat interactions, and ultimately, FCR.
The organization implemented the FCR Service and created business rules and alarms to detect and
notify supervisors of customer interactions that could be classified as repeat
contacts.
Since no two contact centers are the same, management mapped out data
elements in their enterprise that signified repeat contacts.
For them, this was
easily defined by their ticket number. The Interactive Voice Response (IVR) unit
requires all customers to enter their ticket number prior to being routed to an
agent. The WFO system reads this ticket number through CTI and attaches it to
each recorded interaction.
The FCR Service monitors
recorded interactions and ticket numbers and links interactions together.
Multiple interactions with similar ticket numbers are flagged as repeat
contacts.
The distributor has a strong leadership team and is capable of mapping
their technologies together end to end. Not all contact centers are capable of
capturing IVR information, such as ticket number, and mapping it to CTI data
harnessed by other technologies, such as their recording system.
Their properly enacted
data sharing plan allows them to simply use ticket number to determine FCR. However, for most contact centers, the task of measuring
FCR is not so simple.
With the power of WFO and the FCR Service, this task is handled effortlessly. The FCR Service allows for contact center managers to program it using any piece of
data captured from the environment. This can be via claim number, case number,
ticket number, customer number, account number, process id, or even un-mapped
basic telephony information such as caller id, extension, agent or even date
and time.
At its most basic level FCR can be measured by caller id, date and time.
Has this phone number called in within a recent
period of time? If so, it’s a repeat contact. At its most advanced levels,
FCR can be measured using mapped telephony data.
Once the BPO had configured the FCR Services to capture and flag repeat interactions, it was simply a
matter of reviewing and evaluating those interactions to determine root cause.
The Evaluation Assignment Services were configured to
automatically assign all interactions flagged for FCR to the next available evaluator.
Evaluations were performed on those repeat interactions and the system automatically pushed the proper learning
materials to the agents.
The WFO system uncovered a lack of core competency by
agents in a key portion of the BPO's processes. By revising their
learning materials, the BPO improved agent knowledge and noticed a considerable
drop in repeat interactions over the next 60 days. This reduced
their overall call volume and ultimately improved their bottom line.
However, it doesn’t stop there. One workforce optimization solution, Virtual Observer, has extended FCR through to the Speech Analytics feature set to harness the power of the spoken word to uncover repeat interactions.
Virtual Observer's "FCR Services" look for any number of configurable words and phrases to determine repeat contacts, such as, “I’ve called before”, “I’m calling back”, “This is the nth time I’ve called”, and many more.
