May 23, 2022

5 Ways to Improve First Call Resolution and Increase Response Rate

You love that your bank offers click-to-call directly from their website and mobile app. You don’t have to search for a customer service number, and you can skip repetitive authentication questions if you’re already logged into the app. You’re connected with a friendly service representative, but that’s as far as you get until things start to go sideways. The agent isn’t the right person to help with your request. You wait on hold for several minutes, only for the next agent to say you need to speak with someone else. Your frustration starts to build. On the other end of the line, the bank’s CSAT score is dropping and they’re incurring higher operational costs.

First Call Resolution (FCR) has been a core metric for decades and directly affects customer satisfaction, agent efficiency, and operational costs, yet still many companies do not score well. Here’s how to give callers the information they want fast and on the first try.

1. Leverage an omnichannel strategy

Omnichannel service allows your customers to use self-service like text and chat, contact your business via multiple channels like email, phone, and social media, and transfer the conversation easily to another channel without having to start from the beginning each time they talk to a new agent. This seamlessness creates a smooth and effortless flow that provides the answers customers want faster. Digital channels also tend to have faster response rates (ex: 40 seconds for live chat on average) and higher satisfaction rates (82% for chat and 61% for email, compared to 44% for phone).

2. Deflect mobile calls to digital and self-service channels

About 30% of customers say their most frustrating issue is information that is simple but hard to find. For a bank, this could be information about a certain policy. For a healthcare provider, this could be what to expect at an upcoming appointment. Companies can quickly address these inquiries for mobile callers by redirecting them to the information they need via digital and self-service channels. Mobile callers will be identified by your IVR and offered the option to be redirected to this alternative service experience (ex: a link sent via text message to an FAQ or a “how to” video). The response rate is rapid (as fast as a text message can be sent), customers can get their issues resolved faster on their own terms, and companies can lower interaction costs.

3. Triage calls using an intelligent IVR

A great way to minimize transfers is to deploy an intelligent IVR that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to communicate with callers in a natural, human-like way and route them accordingly. For example, a bank could intelligently route a customer to a small business specialist based on them saying they’re calling about small business services. This accelerates your response rate while getting callers to the best-suited resource immediately. An intelligent IVR can also use sentiment analysis to determine whether a caller’s speech is positive or negative – indicating positive or negative emotions – and route them accordingly (ex: routing an angry customer to a retention specialist or VIP service team). 

4. Implement a knowledge base

About 70% of customers first try to resolve their issue independently, but less than one-third of companies offer self-service options such as a knowledge base for them to do so. A well-designed knowledge base provides access to important information 24x7 so customers can serve themselves – increasing the chance of them finding the answers and information they need on the first attempt, usually within a few minutes. Lyft, Amazon, and Wix offer great examples of what this should look and operate like.

5. Enable collaboration tools for agents to efficiently interact with back-office experts

Why put customers on hold when your agents can communicate with a manager or back-office expert in real-time? A Workstream Collaboration (WSC) application converges siloed UC and contact center applications into one tool with one application, enabling users to communicate in context regardless of who they are or where they work (ex: an agent working on the East Coast can live chat with a back-office expert working out of the company’s LA headquarters about a question while the customer is on the line). Experts within the organization become more reachable – accelerating response time – and your agents will be happier with more effortless collaboration.  

Improving your contact center’s FCR rate and response rate depends on the design, quality, and ongoing management of these solutions. On average, companies that rely on Servion’s expertise improve response and resolution time. We have helped hundreds of businesses customize and implement these and other contact center solutions to achieve their desired outcomes, offering global delivery and support capabilities, certification across a wide range of platforms, decades of developer experience, and more. Connect with our team to see how we can help you.