The Harvard Business Review found that the service a company provides has 5 times the effect on a customer’s perception of the company than did any other aspect of what that company did. I recently experienced this first hand as I dealt with my cell phone provider and Research in Motion.

Back in September of last year, my cell provider contacted me to let me know that a data sharing plan I had between my iPhone and iPad was being discontinued. Apparently, the sharing plan wasn’t compatible with other options I had selected for my cell phone. The agent asked what other plan I would like to go on, but given I had only had the plan for six months and had paid to get onto it, my response was that I would be going to a different provider for my tablet.

Turns out I didn’t really need 3G for my tablet, so I left it at that. Tossed the uselessSIM card and never looked back.

Until last week, when I actually looked at the bills my wife was paying – apparently, I’ve been paying for this discontinued plan for 7 months.

Here’s the interesting part. When I called the company to get the bill fixed, I was told that they had actually discontinued a plan they had given me without telling me as a free extra, and that my original plan that I signed up for had not been affected.

And since I didn’t call them to cancel the plan I had actually paid for, I was charged correctly.

When you think about good customer service, the baseline is about meeting customer expectations. The really good companies exceed your expectations. And of course, the sub par  company will rely on company policy to enforce poor service at the expense of the consumer.

Since my provider called me to tell me ‘my plan was cancelled’, they gave me the perception of poor customer service (since I had paid too join the program). But they didn’t actually cancel my plan – they just told me they did. In reality, they kept on charging me and then told me I was at fault because I hadn’t cancelled the service that I didn’t know I had to cancel because they told me they had already cancelled it.

Now let’s look at another experience I had – in this case with Research in Motion. After 14 months, my Playbook developed a faulty USB connection. As a result, I couldn’t even power it up. I worked with their support, who started by sending me a new power adapter to use an alternate plug on the Playbook (at no charge), and then told me that unfortunately, they couldn’t send me a replacement Playbook with a working connector since the device was not under warranty. Instead, I’d have to return it to them with an RMA and they’d have to fix it. There would be no charge and they would pay the shipping. Out of warranty. 14 months later. (Yes, I bought it on launch day.)

My expectations had been that my Playbook was now just a brick. RIM stepped up and impressed the heck out of me.

So if companies are defined by their products alone – well, my cell phone company can usually deliver calls and data to me. My RIM Playbook, on the other, is still second to my iPad.

But I’m looking for reasons to do business with RIM.

And I’m looking for excuses to not do business with my phone provider.

There are ten steps that will provide a powerful First Contact Resolution (FCR) plan that will give you the information and tools needed to improve the performance if your assisted service channels. FCR is often used as a benchmark, and samples and averages are sufficient for these purposes, but they quickly run up against a wall when used in providing an ongoing and actionable FCR improvement program.  The steps below outline the things that need to be done by a business for sustainable, fact-based First Contact Resolution improvement.

#1 – Measurement must be reliable and consistent

FCR measurement that you take in your contact centers needs to provide the same information about your agent performance and customer experience today that it does tomorrow and the next day. The measurement needs to be based on a single and consistent set of rules that are automated and provide consistent and fair results for all agents.

#2 – Measurement must be accurate and auditable

You can’t manage the customer experience directly; you can only manage the tools that you control.  The information you collect on FCR should be used to manage your agents consistently, and as a result you will need to be able to provide specific examples of good and bad performance.  The summary numbers you provide must be an accurate representation of the performance of that agent, and you need to be able to prove its validity as well.

#3 – Cover all interactions and all channels

To provide an example to an agent of a specific repeat call for a specific repeat reason, you would potentially require a survey sample size that exceeds your entire interaction volume for the month.  By capturing information on every interaction, you can easily locate the examples you need for agent or process improvement leading to increased FCR.  In addition, agent performance and customer experience are also affected by the various incoming channels you provide for your assisted service.  Agents providing unmanaged and untracked email support for a period of time during the day invalidate most of the other metrics you collect about their performance.  By tracking all interactions – calls, emails, chats, etc., then you can develop a complete picture of how your agents perform in relationship to FCR, and how they affect your customers across all of your channels.

#4- Measurement is actionable down to the individual agent, customer, and interaction level

People, process and technology make up your contact center.  Customer interactions occur with systems and with agents, and the information you collect should provide information on each of these different ‘views’ of the overall experience.  By providing detailed information on customer experience as the customer sees it, and being able to look at that same information from the agents view point as well, you can connect the dots between what the agent does and what the customer experiences.  You can now start to take actionable steps towards understanding what changes in the call center will do to the customer experience and the subsequent affect on cost and revenues.

#5- Repeat reasons should be identifiable

Imagine if your child in grade school came home with a report card which told you that their average for the term was B+.  With no detailed per subject breakdown of the marks, you wouldn’t be able to help your child improve.  You could only provide a broad tutoring program across all subjects in the hopes that the overall mark would go up.  Contact centers are often managed this way, with attention paid to specific units and specific tests that may be particularity bad but not representative of the overall performance.  By capturing contact reasons on all contacts, you can start to look at FCR performance on a per subject basis, and start helping the agents improve in the specific subjects areas that they have problems with.

#6 – Repeat reasons should be accurate and manageable

Accuracy of information needs to be in the 90 / 95 percentile or greater.  Contact reasons must be tracked and managed accurately in the contact center, through a combination of education and audit.  Agents will often enter incorrect contact reasons because a) the contact reasons don’t make sense or are too complicated, b) it takes too long, or c) they just don’t care.  There are multiple ways of improving the accuracy of contact driver tracking:

• Using the context of an incoming interaction to help drive the work flow of the call gives the agents a direct ‘What’s in it for me’ – it makes their jobs easier.
• Providing auditable reports on call distributions across all agents lets management easily see where agents are bulking up on the ‘default’ codes
• Providing contact history on every interaction, listing contact reason and agent name, increases peer pressure to ‘get it right’, since the information is used down the line.
• Implementing QA recording reviews and validating the reasons against the recordings
• Educating the agents on the importance of contact reasons and what they are used for
• Capturing reasons based on agent activities and not on agent entry
• Ensuring that contact reasons do not go overboard – evaluating the need for reasons and sub reasons and ensuring that the lists stay clear and manageable and provide business value while maintaining maximum agent productivity.

#7 – FCR rates should be presented in real time

Getting an FCR rate presented to someone of what they did last month or last quarter is historical information.  Providing agents with up-to-date FCR information allows you to properly manage an agent based on current activities.

# 8 – Should be used for direct agent incentives

If you’ve done the first 7 things, then you should start to use these FCR numbers for incenting your agents.  FCR behavior is what you want to improve in your business because it’s what the customer wants – to have their call resolved – and it’s what you want – to not require that subsequent call back or to lose that customer.

#9. FCR information should be used by supervisors for coaching agents

Once you understand the contact types an agent has issue with, you can provide coaching on the specifics that they individually have the biggest problems with – complete with actionable examples of what they did and how they can improve.

#10. FCR improvement should be ongoing and sustainable

All too often, FCR is a series of projects or an ‘initiative’. Properly implemented, it should be an ongoing management tool that provides easy access to the reports and information you need to track performance and make corrections.  Imagine if, as part of your budgeting process, you only received information about how well you are doing twice a year based on a sample of your vendors.  It would make managing the business very difficult.  But since money is important, there are multiple reporting mechanisms in place to provide fast and detailed information about your budget performance.  This same capability should be carried across to your contact center performance, and then it can be used consistently and repeatedly to improve your operations. With auditable FCR detail – in a form you can use daily or hourly, you have the information you need for sustained FCR improvement.

I recently had a coffee with a friend of mine and we got to discussing the relevance of customer experience within the contact center. It seems that whenever you look at the drivers behind contact center improvements they fall into one of three categories – increased revenue; decreased cost, or that ephemeral customer experience improvement.

It started me thinking about another truism in business – why businesses spend money. There are three reasons – to increase revenue; to decrease cost, or to decrease risk.

I immediately overlapped these two triangles. Revenue, uh huh. Cost. Yup. But….

Could it be that customer experience is corporately considered risk?

Because seemingly that would be the only way someone would spend money on it.

Do companies consider that a poor customer experience (correlating to poor satisfaction rates and thus to high churn rates) represents a significant risk to the business? Is customer churn a risk that we just accept because it’s so pervasive (think of driving a car for example – high risk but considered mundane).

Put it another way – is losing customers something that a company would buy insurance against?

And even if you would buy insurance against it – could you?  Could the possibility of losing customers based on poor customer service even be quantified?  So never mind would someone buy insurance for it – would anyone sell insurance for it? How would the actuarials deal with something as qualitative as customer experience?

Simple answer – they couldn’t.

So, no insurance for those customer experience disasters.

When you step back and look at it, I don’t think that businesses really consider customer experience to really be a risk.  It’s a factor that allows a company to increase revenues based on having lower churn, and happier, higher spending customers.  But I don’t think it’s thought of as a risk to the business.

And if customer experience isn’t really a risk, then wouldn’t that mean that no-one is actually willing to spend money on improving it – unless it is tied directly to either increased revenue, or decreased costs (the other purchasing drivers).

And if that’s true, then it is a sad truth, I think, about customer experience. Apparently your call really isn’t that important. But your money is.

But didn’t we all know that, really?

With almost a third of all calls in your call center being repeat calls, it means that 30 cents of every dollar you spend in your call center is spent on re-work. Prudent call center managers should have an intimate and detailed understanding of the effect of non-conformance on the overall business.

Reduced Need for the Service

If you are running a typical call center, you are continually being asked to do more with less. You have been given systems and technology that help to a degree, but overall global competition means that your budget is continually stretched. By focusing on improving your first call resolution rates, you will be able to actually reduce the number of incoming calls that your call center needs to deal with. A 15 percent improvement in FCR rates, for example, means that you will have a corresponding 15 percent or more reduction in call volumes.

The improvement in rework and its associated net cost base reduction from a reduced call volume is only the tip of the iceberg when you are evaluating the impact of First Call Resolution on your business.

Reduced Hiring Costs

Most call centers have significant ongoing attrition rates. As FCR goals are met and call volumes reduce, natural attrition will allow you to reduce the overall number of agents required to support your existing business. Because attrition rates are expressed as a percentage of the number of staff, replacement hiring costs are related to the absolute number of call center staff you have. As the number of agents required in your business drops, the absolute dollar replacement cost will fall accordingly. Remember, 10% of 100 is greater than 10% of 90.

Improved Up-sell rates

When you deal with a customer and do not resolve their problem, you will not be able to up-sell them anything. As a result, a significant percentage of your calling base will be unavailable to your offers. By improving your FCR rate by 15%, for example, you immediately increase your up-sell base by a  corresponding amount.

Reduced Customer Churn

There is a direct correlation between your FCR rate and your customer satisfaction, and therefore your customer churn rate. As you improve FCR, your overall business will show corresponding improvement.

The benefits mentioned above represent significant upside for a company. When factoring in the various costs that comprise the overall financial impact of FCR, one must take into account all aspects of the equation. Once you start applying numbers to these, the dollar impact to your business will quickly add up to significant dollars. The question you must ask yourself and is “Can I afford not to improve my first call resolution rates?”

Be sure to sign up for my upcoming webinar “Repeat Calls: Assessing the Damage; Calculating the Cost” coming up on March 21st.  It’s free to attend, and I’ll  delve into the details of some of the numbers above and show you how to justify them to management in a way that holds up to scrutiny.  You can sign up here.

I recently decided that I was paying too much for my internet.  I did a (very) small bit of research and found I could easily cut my bill in half with another provider.  So I made my cancellation call.

I knew full well that one likely outcome would be maintaining my current provider with a newer, cheaper package.  As it happens, that’s exactly what happened.

But as I contemplated my attitude during the call, I realized that my overriding feeling was mistrust.  I questioned the agent incessantly on what the package was. I repeated back to them multiple times what I was going to get.  I questioned the charges.  I re-questioned the  charges.  I asked about the charges again.  Then I went back to  the services I would be getting again.

After it was all said and done, I signed up for another year.

Well, maybe.

I asked that the agent confirm my understanding and the pricing in writing.  He couldn’t.

I asked that he provide me the contracts  to review.  He couldn’t.

He told me there were no sign up fees or installation fees.  I guess I have to be satisfied with his verbal.

He assured me that his notes were up to date and accurate for the interaction.  I guess I have to be satisfied with that.

He guaranteed me absolutely 100% of the advertised bandwidth.  I know he was wrong there; no-one  gets the full bandwidth they sign up for – there is always loss.

So, I don’t have anything in writing.  I don’t yet have a bill. The service hasn’t been turned on.  And I’m apparently committed for a year.

Now I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.

My internet provider has created  a customer base who feels that what they are told on the phone will likely not be correct.  The agents make promises but don’t have authority or knowledge to make those promises.  What I’m told and what happens will be two different things because the company will not stand behind what the agent says on the phone.  As a result, they have created a culture of mistrust amongst their clientele.

Sadly, I know that I’m not abnormal in this thinking.  And it’s also sad because at the end of the day I signed with them again. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.  Why do I feel like blushing?

In The Average Call Part One, we started our look at AHT. To continue…

Average handle time is for average calls. What’s an average call? Doesn’t exist. The “average” Upstream Works customer has well over 100 combinations of customer requests and actions required to handle those requests. The level of interaction complexity, and time needed varies greatly. And – call complexity almost never lines up with how the queues are set up.

Second, for typical contact centers, roughly 40% of calls are unwanted and should not have happened. This goes beyond First Call Resolution – we are talking about calls that should have been handled through self-service, or calls generated because another part of the business didn’t do what they should have.

So, if we manage agents (and provide incentives) based on an average call time without taking into account the differences between call types, the message to the agent is that it’s more important to be quick than solve the customers problem. Complex calls don’t get the time they need and there’s a higher chance that the customer’s issue won’t be resolved.

Not good for customer satisfaction nor call volumes.

This sounds instinctively correct, but we can’t prove it. Or can we?

Next time.

If you’ve sat in on any of my webinars on First Call Resolution (FCR), you’ll know that what’s important isn’t what the definition of FCR is, but rather that you calculate it consistently across the board and that it gives you some meaningful information.

When I started doing some research into the actual definition of FCR used in the industry, it became pretty clear that the world is split into two camps.

Camp 1:  The total number of calls (or contacts) resolved right the first time divided by the total number of calls.

Camp 2: The total number of calls resolved right the first time divided by the total number of first calls.

These give you the same basic information, presented two different ways.  Camp 2 is a better number if you are measuring FCR through surveys, since you won’t actually have the total number of calls available (since the survey isn’t a 100% sample size) . However,  on its own it doesn’t take into account  any non-resolved calls.  If you have a lot of unresolved calls, they don’t show up. For example:

• 68‘One and Done Calls’
• 100 ‘Issues’
• 200 follow up repeat calls (extraneous information)
• FCR⁽²⁾ = 68/100 = 68%

If you’re in the first Camp, then you’ve got the total number of issues and the total number of calls:

• 68‘One and Done Calls’
• 100 ‘Issues’
• 200 follow up repeat calls
• FCR⁽¹⁾ = 68/300 = 23%

In Camp 1, your FCR number is also intrinsically related to how well you resolve calls (average number of calls to resolve), because as the total number of calls drop, your FCR gets better:

• 68 ‘One and Done Calls’
• 100 ‘Issues’
• 50 follow up repeat calls
• FCR⁽¹⁾ = 68/150 = 45%

So when a number of 68% FCR is bandied about as the industry average, I must confess my confusion.   If this is calculated as FCR⁽¹⁾ then it’s a totally different number than when calculated as FCR⁽²⁾.

Ah well. Statistics; gotta love ‘em.

I’m putting part two on the Average Call series on a short hold. Came across something while reading my morning paper on Tuesday.

On the front page of the Life section, there was an article titled “Got a complaint? Post it on social media for a quick response”. It was a clarion call for customers to bypass the queue, and go social to get what they want. Quoting from the article, “Didn’t receive dipping sauce with your order? Ignored by a salesperson? Whine on Facebook or Twitter, and you’re guaranteed an instant response from the company’s social media rep.”

The piece centered on one Virginia Sokoloff (no relation) who had had her outbound flight canceled. She had issues at the airport getting a new outbound flight, and in the process the airline desk agent voided her return ticket. It was only on her return that she discovered this, and had to buy an expensive one way ticket to get home. Understandably, she was upset and wanted the company to make it right.

So, she posted on the company’s Facebook wall, received an apology, a ticket refund, and a discount on her next flight.

After being ignored by 3 agents at her home airport, getting no help at the return airport, and receiving no satisfaction through customer service email and phone.

Great. We now have mass media encouraging customers to do the ultimate zero out of queue, where they can get someone that can actually help them while publicly embarrassing the company.

With 51% of company Facebook interactions negative (a stat from the aforementioned article), it’s clear that social media is becoming a broadcast channel for poor customer service. The recommended approach to handling social media is to make sure that there’s always someone from the company listening. But the more successful that social media channels become for customer resolution, the more that customers, deserving and non-deserving will start there. That 51% is only going to go up, and the reactive approach will break down because it won’t scale.

I respectfully submit that the real effect of social media will be that customer service will be forced to meet a higher standard. For everybody, not just your gold customers.

One last thought – if you have to provide an avenue for a customer to escalate to someone who can really help, isn’t there a less public way of doing that?

(Postscript- I’ve intentionally have left out the airline name in the posting. I use them frequently, and have found that their service has dramatically improved over the last five years, to the point where they are my preferred carrier. Nevertheless, it can’t be denied that what happened to Ms. Sokoloff was a class one major fail.)

I deal with so many different agent desktop applications in the day to day of dealing with different customers, prospects and industry professionals.  I’m truly amazed at the variation of what has been implemented in contact centers across North America – from the state of the art, integrated desktops that provide the agent with a single cockpit at a glance, down to what still remains the number one application in use in contact centers today (from our experience) – that workhorse, the AS/400 green screen.

When companies look at updating their agent desktop applications, they evaluate vendors for what they are considering to be a commodity item, and end up comparing feature to feature on the chart, and trading that off against the cost of the system.

What often gets lost by both the business and the technology groups is the fact that, whatever the choice, this is an application that has to able to provide meaningful value to the agents, and do it in such a way that it’s convenient for them to use 60 to 80 times a day, as they deal with call after call after call.

Flipping back and forth between web pages, moving the mouse around in a scrolled screen, or duplicating fields are all things that agents hate; they are things that cost you time and create errors – and they are all things that agents will skip if they can.

Remember that agents are conscious of handle times, so they still do want to be quick.  More importantly, if they don’t see a ‘What’s in it for me’ (WIIFM), they will skip what they can. Worse, they will see it as just another BOHICA (you’ll have to look that one up yourself!).  And you, as a management team, either deal with a sub-par, underutilized system, or worse –  deal with the fact that you purchased a very expensive enterprise application that gets minimized and ignored every morning.

Keep your agents in mind.  Over and over and over again.

Measure the time for every call.  Add ‘em, then divide by the number of calls.  Presto, “Average Handle Time!”

The number one measurement for call centers.  Why?  For that, we can thank (or blame) a Danish telephone engineer named A.K. Erlang.  He was trying to find out how to determine the number of expensive telephone circuits needed to handle the calls of the (presumably Danish) population.  It involves a bunch of math that I used to be really good at years ago.

For call centers, if you substitute agents for circuits, Erlang tells you how many expensive agents you’ll need to handle the calls, based on an average call length. So, if you know AHT, you know what it’s going to cost you.  And if you get the call times down, you’ll save money.

Simple.  Powerful.  And…  dangerous?   Why?

In most contact centers, effectiveness measurements (FCR, CSAT, Quality), are derived through a subjective process on a sampling of calls.   But, AHT is the one thing all call centers can empirically measure, based on 100% of the calls.  Thus, it’s the one measurement that is undisputable, and is believed to be actionable.

Stated another way, for efficiency, we have a measurement that we can get instantly and we trust.  For effectiveness, we have a measurement that we get long after the original event, and is, at best a guess.  Which one gets used to make decisions?

And therin lies the danger.  In my next post, we’ll examine how potentially dangerous this can be.