FCR

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, what that means is, after some diligence you discover that you are operating at an FCR rate of 60%, then probably a high percentage of up to 40% of your calls could be 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 are 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 costs by an average of $276,000 annual call costs 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 losing valuable and hard earned revenue. These customers are definitely not happy customers so improving FCR will definitely improve your CSAT rate or NPS Score or Revenue Retention 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.cx@gmail.com
630-743-1486

NPS Value and Improvement

I find that many of my executive  clients have improving  Net Promoter Score as an objective.  But in no way do they understand how to go about doing that.

They  do understand that improving NPS will accomplish a few very amazing things.

1.       Decrease revenue churn. Remember the old adage, "its cheaper to keep an old customer than to make a new one" ? Well, all the whitepapers, surveys, benchmarkers out there have shown improving NPS is directly tied to hanging on to revenue. In fact, many businesses are churning revenue to the tune of 20% (and more). Yes, that is a lot of money.  So NPS is important to improving revenue churn and adding low cost revenue to the bottom  line.

2.       Increase Loyalty. Loyal customers buy again and again and they buy more. In fact AOV (Average Order Value) can increase as much as 32% if Loyalty/NPS  is maintained at high enough levels.

3.       Tolerance of Operational Errors. Lets face it, everyone makes mistakes. If your NPS is up and your customers are happy and loyal, they will tolerate a error now and then, and hang in with you while you fix it quickly.

You get the idea, right? Improve NPS and you will reap all sorts of benefits to your business.  Many of my clients have told me at the beginning of our relationship that they put out a survey for a NPS and hope for the best. They don’t know what to expect.  Its too complex a number they tell me. How do I fix something I can't measure or manage?

NPS is a scientific number explained by many experts in the industry as being based on a direct question: How likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to your friends and colleagues? The scoring for this answer is most often based on a 0 to 10 scale. Companies are encouraged to follow this question with an open-ended request for elaboration, soliciting the reasons for a customer's rating of that company or product. These reasons can then be provided to front-line employees and management teams for follow-up action. Local  managers should at this point call back customers to engage them in a discussion about the feedback they provided through the NPS survey process, solve problems, and learn more so they can coach account representatives. This is a fairly downstream way of looking for info that will enable you to improve service, loyalty, revenue.  In reality how to influence the surveys and the feelings of your customers in order to drive up the NPS, is accomplished way upstream from any survey.

NPS is a result of improving the customer experience (CX) across the board.  Improving these  KPIs plays a large role in boosting NPS.

·       Customer effort spent in securing service or getting a problem solved is a primary component of building NPS among a customer base.

·         FCR - First Contact Resolution is one of the ways to lower and improve customer effort. Nothing makes a customer feel better than having their problem resolved first time -  every time.

·         Consistent experience across all channels is another proven way to boost NPS. The engagement of your company with your customers needs to be consistent and personalized regardless of how your customer engages you.

Get proper measures in place, and track measure and manage all the varying components of those factors instrumental in boosting NPS and you will not only be able to improve and predict your NPS but you will see it rise steadily ...  reap the benefits of increased revenue ... lower your costs and enjoy many more loyal, happy customers.

skip.stringham.cx@gmail.com

630-743-1486