35% of calls prove to be repetitive
The ultimate goal of any inbound call centre is to deliver an excellent customer experience. In an idyllic world, your product or service would be so good that customers would not have to get in contact with your company after the transaction. But in today’s world, customer support agents are, on most occasions, the only ones that can positively influence overall satisfaction with the product or service by fixing potential post-purchase issues. In other words, they can save customers from leaving the company after a bad experience and thus, can extend customer life cycles. According to Hubspot, 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies that offer excellent customer service.
When a customer calls your contact centre, you want your agents to address the query immediately and solve the problem in such a way that the customer does not need to call again. This is where First Call resolution (FCR) can help you stay on top of the game by helping you measure the effectiveness of issue resolution in your contact centre. A high FCR percentage, therefore, implies higher customer satisfaction.
As nice as this sounds, FCR is not always easy to measure; two main challenges come with it. The first one is, how to detect repetitive calls from the same customer and for the same issue, which (to make it even more difficult), have most probably been answered by different agents. And the second one is how to detect the reasons and topics of these repetitive calls, it would take a lot of effort of manual listening to be able to identify these elements.
Speech Analytics is one of the rising technologies that has proven itself useful in tackling the challenges of measuring FCR and opening the door to new insights and discoveries based on its analysis. Several Xdroid customers already use our product’s FCR feature to track the FCR and identify areas of improvement, not only to train and coach agents but also for wide-ranging company issues.
Customer FCR Research – Retail Industry
One of our clients active in the retail industry did a very interesting investigation using Xdroid’s VoiceAnalytics to measure FCR effectiveness in their company.
Over the course of a month, 31 days to be precise, they automatically detected and tracked all the repetitive calls using our platform’s FCR feature. By importing metadata information such as Case ID and Customer ID, they identified which customers had to call again after already reporting the issue once before. A total of 200k calls were analysed and the results showed that 80k of these calls were repetitive in the specified period. This was a significant number of calls that has an impact on both customer satisfaction levels as well as operational costs. This data can be a game-changer for our client considering how many organisations in the industry have no clue about how many repeat calls they receive.
They conducted further analysis and discovered that out of those 200k calls:
- 65.22% of the reported issues were solved in the first call
- 30.72% of the reported issues needed from 2 to 5 repetitive calls to be solved
- 3.24% needed from 6 to 10 calls to be solved
- 0.24% needed more than 15 calls to be solved
They could also easily and automatically detect which issues these repeating calls were concerned with. They discovered that incidences, cancellations and complaints had the lowest FCR percentages. With the use of the platform’s Word Cloud feature, they could do deep dive into these category results and discover the most mentioned keywords on the repetitive calls. In the category, complaints/subcategory transport, the most mentioned words were related to waiting times, for instance, “two weeks”, “two days”, and “ten days”. Thanks to this analysis they realised that transportation and delivery times were considered too long by customers, meaning there was a gap between the expectation of the customers and the delivery of their orders.
Another thing they were interested in measuring was the FCR in technical service-related calls across the different categories, due to the high agent volume they had allocated to the technical service department. The analysis showed that technical service was responsible for:
- 50% of the repetitive calls in the Query category
- 61% of the repetitive calls in the Incidence category
- 31% of the repetitive calls in the Claim category
- 19% of the repetitive calls in the Cancellation category
Through this, they could measure the effectiveness of issue resolution of technical service agents in the different areas and create coaching plans to address their weaknesses.
The company could then focus on issues that had the highest impact thereby taking a targeted approach to significantly reduce the repetition of calls through improved processes and communication. This is just one example of how measuring FCR can help you discover and tackle issues on a general company level. If you wish to discover more about it, request a demo here.
