Measuring first touch resolution

[flynnhan]

Our contact centre is currently looking at ways to measure first touch resolution for both call and email. We are currently logging customer contacts (interactions) and queries (cases / require further follow up) manually in an in-house developed system, but are in the design phase of a major automation project which will include a multimedia universal routing solution and a new backoffice application with high levels of process automation through workflow.

Our questions:

What is the definition of first touch resolution for call and email? Are there multiple definitions?

How do we measure this in a manual environment? How do we develop systems to measure this?

What best practice target do we set?

Looking forward to some enlightenment!

Aileen

[Karsten Fuhrmann]

Hi,

I don't think that there's an overall definition, because it very much depends on your business as well. In my experience, it's a good start to define: no additional contact within 72 hours after the initial contact.

I don't know how to measure this in a manual environment. A technical way might be to compare e-Mail addresses and Calling-Line-IDs, if this is possible.

As a target, I would set 95%.

Hope, this helps a bit.

Best Regards,
Karsten Fuhrmann

[mikael]

Aileen,

Measuring resolution rate is indeed very important. If you're tracking your cases via a system that allows you to run reports against the database, you might try writing a query that groups cases by customer id and date. Count and plot the number of cases per customer within some appropriate time frames -- e.g. 4 hours, 8 hours, next day, day after that, etc., and see what pops up. You should be opening cases in the call-tracker for e-mails too, so this approach should give you a good view of your situation. (If you are not recording cases submitted by e-mail into the call-tracker, you should be.)

If you get a substantial number of contacts within a short period of time, that's a red flag -- investigate deeper. Pull some of those case records and see if they are actually the same problem being dealt with by two separate agents.

I watched one center, in the course of a review, and noted where agents would give a possible solution to the caller, and then end the call and close the record. If the customer called back in and said that the fix hadn't worked, the rep opened up a new case record instead of reopening the old one. You guessed it, the center was bragging about how they had a 95% first call resolution rate (FCRR). When we ran some reports, the true FCRR was about 40%.

FCRR goals should take into account the subject of the call -- it is unrealistic to expect a high FCRR on very complex issues. It is also inappropriate to accept a low FCRR for "known-answer" simple inquiries.

An 80 t0 85% FCRR for the first level queue is a good general target for, for example, a software support group for a general business application. In time, you can probably do better than that, taking it up to 95% for the appropriate categories of calls.

Hope this helps...

[gkern]

I would agree that your definition needs to reflect your own business. You need to come up with a reasonable definition, depending on your ability to track it consistently through either the switch or call records. You can track on repeat calls on the same issue (via CRM tools) or just look for repeat calls period. Neither is going to be a "true" definition of actual repeat calls because their will always be exceptions when calls were tracked as repeat when they really were not or vice versa. Sometimes you get an unavoidable call from the same customer and sometimes the subsequent call could have been avoided through more proactive service.

What you are looking for is relative movement up or down in the number to see if you are improving week to week, month to month. Track it consistently and identify drivers of repeat calls and focus on the most common reasons.

Greg Kern
CallTech