First contact resolution

The FCR is comparable to a larger scale metric that indicates the percentage of incoming tickets resolved by staff in a single interaction – the FCR rate. High FCR signifies that your agents can keep a low response time and provide speedy resolution to customer requests.

Frequent FCR measurement and thorough ticket analysis should be a part of your contact center operations. It not only provides insights into your business performance but also has a great influence on customer satisfaction levels and customer loyalty.

FCR is a key performance indicator (KPI) together with other metrics like average handle time (AHT), average hold time, rate of agent turnover, and others.

In customer-centric businesses providing an excellent customer experience every time is the most important of the contact center objectives. Keeping track of various contact center metrics can make or break a business. You need to study and understand available data to determine where you can improve your business, exceed customer expectations, minimize the risk of having dissatisfied customers and prevent customer churn.

To be successful in your business ventures, keep in mind that prompt issue resolution is just one of the ways to ensure great customer feedback. Training your staff to provide personalized care, and nurture the customers while upholding a friendly but professional approach is what will make you stand out from the competition.

How to measure first contact resolution?

To work with the available data, you need to get them in plain old numbers so you can set achievable goals for yourself and your business.

When it comes to accurate measurement of FCR, you can calculate gross and net FCR.

The first contact resolution formula for gross FCR is as follows:

And the net FCR formula looks like this:

Generally, contact center leaders work with the net FCR metric. It is because some of the incoming tickets simply can’t be solved upon the first interaction. For example, complex tickets requiring tech support, or regional issues like internet outages that need to be forwarded to other departments.

To fulfill your 1st call resolution goals and keep your FCR measurement as high as possible, you can set up self-service tools including a knowledge base, interactive voice response (IVR), or automation to either answer common questions or point customers to the right support representative that can resolve their inquiries in a short period of time.