One of the best things you can do for your customers and for your company when providing customer support is to answer their questions and fix their problems the first time they call in. Indeed, for many industries, First Contact Resolution is now becoming a primary measure of contact center effectiveness and an excellent predictor of customer satisfaction and loyalty. Your First Contact Resolution (FCR) rate is the home run of contact center statistics. It is the single key performance indicator (KPI) that impacts almost every other meaningful statistic and measurement in the contact center.

In the long run, increased FCR will almost always reduce contact volume and operating costs, and increase customer satisfaction. It is worthwhile to spend a bit more time on the phone or work a little bit harder on an issue to get a customer’s issue resolved the first time around. Customers will appreciate the extra effort and the balance sheet will reflect it as revenue generated from streamlined contact center operations.

Granted, not every interaction can be handled on first contact. There will always be problems that require further research, work or help. However, advances in technology, improved employee coaching and empowerment, and a carefully scrutinized evaluation process will increase the number of customer contacts that can be resolved on the first attempt. With a higher FCR rate, your employees will have more time to deal with bigger problems appropriately and the promptly satisfied customers who will be even more loyal than the customer who never had a problem in the first place.

According to a benchmarking study by the Ascent Group, the most common method in use today for measuring FCR is to calculate data from customer management (CRM and CIS) systems. Other common methods involve asking FCR questions on call quality monitoring forms and post-contact or recent-contact customer surveys. While CRM system-derived calculations and customer surveys are good for trending FCR performance over time, the information provided is often not directly actionable. Customer survey based methods have another set of limitations – not every customer takes a survey and those that do and indicate that their issue has been resolved may later decide to make additional calls pertaining to the same issue, which then renders related customer survey FCR data invalid.

The same research found that organizations from a variety of industries use the following methods to measure FCR:

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