Contact Center Trends
Understand Your Contact Center Data to Increase First Call Resolution
By Chandler Galt
0 min read
Finding Ways to Increase First Call Resolution in Your Contact Center
First Call Resolution (FCR) is an important measure of the health of your contact center and customer satisfaction. Only 2% of customers’ whose calls are resolved on first contact stated that they would not continue to use that company’s product or service based on that experience with the call center agent. Conversely, 19% of customers expressed intent to discontinue the use of their product or service when their issue was not resolved by the first agent they spoke with. It’s important to understand how many of your customers call back, and in what time frame, to adequately staff and optimize your contact center solution to answer these critical calls.
Our data science team set out to explore correlations in data from phone numbers that tended to call multiple times and the trends in times between calls. We selected only phone numbers for which their first call was inbound, and was placed between January 2017 and July 2017. A contact’s phone number is considered a new phone number when it calls for the first time to a call center. All the next inbound calls placed within six months are considered recurring calls. This includes scenarios such as a contact placing orders multiple times and a contact calling multiple times to a support center.
How many phone numbers call again within six months?
In general 36% of people calling into a Talkdesk customer will call again after their first call. Ten percent of phone numbers will even call four or more times.
"At Talkdesk, only 36% of customers call more than once within six months of the original call. Of those, 25% will call back within 10 minutes. If they didn’t call within a week, they are very unlikely to call back at all, indicating a strong first call resolution rate."
Jafar Adibi, Head of Data at Talkdesk
How long does it take for a phone number to call again?
An analysis of people who call into Talkdesk found that 9% of phone numbers call back within five minutes after the first call. Note that the sum of all bars in the graph below is greater than 100% because a phone number can call back multiple times.
It’s important to clean your data sets appropriately before analyzing as “phone number” and “contact” are different concepts.
A contact in Talkdesk can have many phone numbers associated with it. 53% of contacts in our database have at least one phone number and, in some cases, contacts can be associated with thousands of phone numbers.
A Talkdesk contact or phone number may have none or many calls associated with them. Contacts imported from third party applications may never “participate” in any Talkdesk call but are still stored in the system. 75% of contacts have appeared at least once in an inbound or outbound call. Additionally, it is possible for multiple contacts to share the same phone number.
An 18% reduction in call volume results in a 15% improvement in first call resolution. Companies that consistently measure FCR see major performance improvements. According to research conducted by The Ascent Group, 60% of companies measuring FCR for a year or longer reported improvements of up to 30% in their performance. Based on our findings, we recommend conducting a First Call Resolution analysis and setting up a process to consistently measure performance. Reducing repeat calls from 25% down to 20% can save the average call center $390K annually. From there, allocating resources to increase first-call resolution for “at risk” customers—the ones who call multiple times—will have a huge impact on your overall first call resolution rate and improve your bottom line.
