First Call Resolution: Great Principle, Hard to Apply
Posted by Ted Hopton on February 5, 2008
Ever since I was first tasked many years ago with implementing a first call resolution (FCR) measurement in my call center, I have been acutely aware how big the gap is between the simple, laudable concept of FCR in contact centers and practical, accurate measurement of it. Donna Fluss tackles the topic, “First-Call Resolution Drives Contact Center Improvements,” thoroughly in ICMI’s Customer Management Insight (CMI), but my favorite part is the graphic she includes that lays out the pros and cons of each option for implementing an FCR solution in a call center. If you’re trying to figure out how to make FCR work in a practical, feasible way in your call center, click on the graphic to expand it and take a look:
Is it just me, or is there no truly appealing option among all those FCR implementation choices — what’s a call center manager supposed to do? For such a promising concept — and Donna expertly explains so many of the reasons call centers want to measure FCR and make it a call center KPI (Key Performance Indicator) — we don’t seem to be much farther along than I was so many years ago when I first struggled to implement it by pulling CSR call resolution codes into an Access database and running queries to calculate in an imperfect way what was a contractual metric for our call center’s client.
What is the answer here? I’d welcome comments and ideas from call center professionals using FCR. How are you measuring it, and how effective do you find those results to be in helping you to improve the customer experience?
ADDENDUM 3/19/08
On this topic, I have just added another post, First Contact Resolution Research Report. There you’ll find more resources for learning about FCR.
ADDENDUM 5/17/08
Just added another post on this topic: CMI: First Contact Resolution Unraveled.
first call resolution 
call center metrics
call center management
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