Today’s demanding service environment requires Service Leaders to deliver cost-effective, quality services that meet the dynamic needs of the business. An all important aspect of service delivery is cost. Service Leaders must know their costs at all times and have a strategy to drive down costs and optimize performance. This industry white paper focuses on what must be done in a service organization to drive First Contact Resolution and reap the positive financial, customer satisfaction and productivity benefits.

Rules of the Road

“Excuse me – would you mind holding for a minute while I research something and get back to you?” Five minutes later, the Support analyst returns to a frustrated customer with some excuse on why they cannot resolve the customer’s issue – leaving the customer experience in shambles. “I will have to escalate your issue to the 2nd level support team so they can resolve your issue - and I apologize but I do not know when they will be in a position to call you back.” Click! What ever happen to properly setting the customer’s expectation? What happens if we further complicated this scenario by not offering the customer the ability to help themselves, not having an Operating Level Agreement in place with the 2nd level team or do not support Total Contact Ownership (you answer it; you own it, till resolved to the customers satisfaction).

Implement a “shift-left” service strategy

Let’s start with implementing a “shift-left” strategy bringing visibility to repetitive, costly issues - especially the ones being continually escalated (leveraging Root Cause Analysis). Your action plan is to examine all problems and escalations to rationalize processes and push problem resolution to the most-efficient and cost-effective support level – all designed with the customer experience in mind. To do this well you will need to track the percentage of resolved cases by levels (teams) and estimate their work effort involved in the resolution, ensuring you have calculated the cost for all the work effort from all the levels (teams) to accurately depict the true cost of the resolution.

In calculating your cost per call/resolution, it’s important to know the resource cost of the other teams (usually depicted in an average hourly wage) as well as the all important Work Effort! With this information in hand, you are well equipped to prove the cost reduction value of your continuous improvement initiatives, justifying investments using financial metrics (ROI, NPV, etc.) and defending empirically against external threats impacting the ecosystem of your support strategy, structure and operations.

Read the full white paper below