Customer Experience Through the Eyes of a Child

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#CustomerExperience through the eyes of a child

Say you want a resolution (FCR, you know)?

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.

Keeping an eye on first call resolution

In both workforce optimization (WFO) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), "First Call Resolution" (FCR) is defined as meeting the customer's need the first time they call, thereby eliminating the need for the customer to follow up with a second call. 

Average Talk Time (ATT) is another common call center statistic which is used to measure the average time an agent spends on each call. 

Typically, Call Center Managers look for lower ATTs, but if lower ATTs are combined with poor first call resolution trends, it's a danger sign indicating that customers may be receiving unsatisfactory answers when they call.

It's important for Call center managers to monitor the FCR rates as well as ATT as one way to gauge performance.

Follow-up calls will create an increase in call volume and require more agents on the floor (hello, workforce management!).

In the call monitoring and workforce optimization world, we know FCR to be a focal point for contact center managers, so we've added a new component to our dashboard analytics features which offer a dynamic glimpse into this metric, as well as ATT and "Calls Answered".

FCR may be viewed differently from company to company, based on preferred interpretations of a basic "Repeat Call for the Same Issue" measurement. 

In order to deliver FCR for Virtual Observer customers we needed to build business rule(s) which considers how each company defines a repeat call. 

For instance, one company might consider a call to be a "repeat call" if the same ANI has called within the last 30 days. 

Another company might say a call is a repeat if the Account Number has called within the last 10 days. 

In summary, FCR is an important metric which is available in Virtual Observer for customers seeking to improve performance.

In both workforce optimization (WFO) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), "First Call Resolution" (FCR) is defined as meeting the customer's need the first time they call, thereby eliminating the need for the customer to follow up with a second call. 

Average Talk Time (ATT) is another common call center statistic which is used to measure the average time an agent spends on each call. 

Typically, Call Center Managers look for lower ATTs, but if lower ATTs are combined with poor first call resolution trends, it's a danger sign indicating that customers may be receiving unsatisfactory answers when they call.

It's important for Call center managers to monitor the FCR rates as well as ATT as one way to gauge performance.

Follow-up calls will create an increase in call volume and require more agents on the floor (hello, workforce management!).

In the call monitoring and workforce optimization world, we know FCR to be a focal point for contact center managers, so we've added a new component to our dashboard analytics features which offer a dynamic glimpse into this metric, as well as ATT and "Calls Answered".

FCR may be viewed differently from company to company, based on preferred interpretations of a basic "Repeat Call for the Same Issue" measurement. 

In order to deliver FCR for Virtual Observer customers we needed to build business rule(s) which considers how each company defines a repeat call. 

For instance, one company might consider a call to be a "repeat call" if the same ANI has called within the last 30 days. 

Another company might say a call is a repeat if the Account Number has called within the last 10 days. 

In summary, FCR is an important metric which is available in Virtual Observer for customers seeking to improve performance.

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10 Ways to Boost Customer Retention

Came across a great read from CallCentreHelper.com on tips for customer retention.

There are many forces at hand trying to weaken your customer retention rates:

- Increasing competition
- Economy
- Emerging technologies
- Changing customer expectations

I've taken the liberty of rewriting their list of tips and condensing the article down to some strong bullet points.

Adopt two or three of these ideas for a boost in customer retention:

- Prep the customer for what's coming next, prior to tranferring to another agent

- Add space in your CRM for interesting notes about the customer. Hobbies, Kids, Music, etc.

- Provide a comprehensive yet abbrieviated recap of what's been discussed.

- Compile an easy-access list of save opportunities for different categories of customers and calls.

- Use analytics at hand to anticipate customer behavior based on experience and trending.

- Music on hold keeps the customers tapping their feet as they await pick-up.

- Be consistent in all channels: phone, email, web chat, social, etc.

- Place a higher value on FCR (first call resolution) as opposed to AHT (average hold time).

- Share successfull calls/stories among agents

- Let the customers know how happy you are to have solved their issue or answered their questions.

You can read the entire article from CallCentreHelper.com in its' original form here:
http://www.callcentrehelper.com/ten-tips-to-improve-customer-retention-16719.htm

Related articles

• Retention v acquisition - social media and customer experience (freshnetworks.com)
• Five Critical Mistakes Chief Customer Officers Say Must Be Avoided (customerthink.com)
• Retaining customers in competitive world! (trak.in)

8 ways Speech Analytics can help your organization ramp up call center quality

It's a given that Speech Analytics has good buzz, but let's step back a second before we assume everyone understands what Speech can do for you.

Different people interpret Speech technologies in different ways. Speech is being used in more and more diverse applications every day.

For purposes of this post, we're speaking of Speech Analytics for the call center, where recorded calls are indexed by a speech engine and then made available for search and reporting.
Here are eight ways Speech Analytics can impact your quality process, in no particular order:

* Improve agent script adherence: Modify imperfect agent processes by quickly finding instances where agents have used slang ("Umm", "Err", "Yo", etc.)

* Flag important calls for evaluation: Highlight calls where customers have mentioned a competitor's name.

* Fine tune your training programs: Identify trends in the types of calls your center is receiving: are they sales calls or support calls? Allocate your training resources appropriately.

* Increase First Call Resolution (FCR): Find out which callers have called in about the same issue more than once.

*  Reduce Average Handle Time (AHT): Discover process improvements as Speech Analytics reveals new insights into how agents respond to common questions. Some agents may be making the same mistakes over and over again. A simple speech search on the response will show exactly how many times it was used.

* Identify trends in customer displeasure: By grouping together keyword phrases which may indicate displeasure ("I'm not happy", "not working", "your service sucks") and instantly see how many calls match this category.

* Ensure compliance: Create a search using agent-trained trigger phrases such as "credit card number" or "social security number" to identify calls where sensitive data may be spoken and recorded. This has direct impact for Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance in particular. Someone tasked with removing these types of media or the specific data in question will appreciate a view where they can just see a list of calls which match this particular query.

* Fine tune your marketing campaigns: By creating search categories using your product names, brand names, ad slogans, and other keyword phrases, you can analyze emerging call trends on what's hot and what's not among all of your campaigns.

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