Skip Stringham - Dr Contact Center

More than 30 years consulting in contact centers. Currently working with B2B and B2C clients all over the world. Multi language, multi location center operations all trying to reduce costs while boosting sales, CSAT, improving CX.

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Thursday, July 28, 2011

It continues to amaze me...

It continues to amaze me when I visit a call center which does not track, measure or manage FCR (First Call Resolution). Think about this for a moment.....are you one of these? Not managing to FCR, will - guaranteed - cost you repeat calls. So, that means if after some diligence you discover that you are operating at an FCR rate of 60%, then probably a high percentage of 40% of your calls are repeat calls. What is your cost per call? How many calls does your call center receive in a year? If you receive 5,000,000 calls per year, then 40% or 2,000,000 calls per year could be repeat calls. If your cost per call is $3.50 then the impact of operating at a FCR rate of 60% is somewhere in the neighborhood of  $7,000,000. Even if its half that, you are spending wayyyy more money than you should to service your customers; not to mention the poor CSAT rate. But we'll save that for another blog entry.

So, now, what are you going to do about it? Would you agree that you could easily justify a minimal expense to figure out what your real exposure is and how to improve your current FCR rate? FCR by the way has been shown by the SQM Group that when increased by 1 percentage point will not only reduce your overall annual costs by an average of $276,000 the but additional impact will be 5 - 10 times that in savings by reducing the number of customers you currently have at risk. Risk of defecting as your customer, risk of going to the competition, risk of your company losing valuable and hard earned revenue. These customers are definitely not happy customers, so improving FCR will definitely improve your CSAT rate.

This FCR thing keeps getting bigger and bigger doesn't it. So what are you waiting for? Don't wait too long, your competition may be managing to a pretty high FCR.

Skip Stringham

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