4 Ways to Increase First Contact Resolution

Mickey Joe Manuel shares his top tips on helping customers on their very first contact.

1. Connect customers to the right agents

Skills-based routing can map customers to the right resource. Work groups can be created using different criteria, meaning that high-priority customers that need tailored services can be directed to subject-matter experts.

This sort of intelligent routing reduces the number of escalations needed, leading to happy customers who are dealt with quickly.

2. Identify the reasons for repeat callers

It is important to identify the reasons why people need to contact you more than once before they can resolve their query. Agents are often the best source of this information, so the use of tools such as post-call surveys is a good way of discovering the issues.

Speech and contact analytics are also helpful tools to give you an even deeper and more impartial view of what’s happening in your contact centre. Following this, you can then implement any training that is necessary to help your agents deal with queries at the initial point of contact.

3. Predict key contact drivers

Try to predict reasons for follow-up interactions into the contact centre – there are often patterns. If you can predict what these may be then you can arm your agents with that information, so they fulfil your customers’ requirements before they even knew they had them. This will cause your customer satisfaction rates to soar and again cut repeat contacts.

4. Empower your agents

If your agents are unsure of what they’re doing then they can’t deliver good service. Similarly, if they don’t feel empowered to make decisions, then that leaves the customer feeling like they can’t trust what’s happening. Even if an agent doesn’t know the answer to a question, making the answers easily accessible will help them feel more confident in their role.

These tips are just a starting point on the route to faster resolution for customers, but sometimes even when you’ve taken all the above actions, repeat calls are unavoidable. For more complex queries they’re even necessary.

However, if you’ve got unnecessary calls coming in to your contact centre caused by agent errors or bad processes, that can be easily fixed.

With thanks to Mickey Joe Manuel at IP Integration