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.

A topic that frequently comes up between senior call center people is that their voice is all too rarely considered by their senior executives.

Last fall, I heard a great keynote from a call center VP where she talked about the company’s core values of customer satisfaction and loyalty.   And how, by managing to those values she and her team were able to transform the operation.

But, it was in a session when her peers were discussing ways of making themselves more relevant to the executives that struck a chord with me.  To paraphrase (clumsily), she said that she would go into weekly meetings fully armed with handle time and occupancy numbers, and watch the execs visibly disengage.

So, she decided NOT to do that anymore.  Didn’t ask anyone, just stopped giving them those stats.  And, here’s the really surprising thing.  No one said anything. Probably no one even noticed.

Instead, she started discussing customer satisfaction and customer feedback.  Topics related to the core company values and to the executive goals (and probably bonuses).

And they started paying attention.  They started seeking her views and guidance on customer issues.

Makes sense to me.