Making a First Contact New Year’s Resolution

I don’t typically make New Year’s Resolutions.  To be honest, I find a lot of people who do make them annoy all of us who don’t.  But in the spirit of the New Year and thinking about the contact center space, I thought a good topic for my first blog this year would be around first contact resolution (FCR). 

If the term or metric in and by itself isn’t a good enough reason to kick off the New Year with a blog on “First Contact Resolution,” check out a few core stats to see how important this metric is within the contact center. 
 

1. It’s What the Customer Wants: According to the 2019 Five9 Customer Service Index Report, when asked to rank a list of factors that make up a great customer service experience, survey respondents chose “the organization or contact center representative can solve the consumer’s problem or issue the first time” as the top ranked factor (48 percent).
    
2. It Improves CSAT, Which Improves Profits: According to MetricNet, there is a direct correlation between solving a customer’s problems on the first contact with customer satisfaction scores (CSAT scores).  Improving CSAT scores is a huge win for any contact center.  There are numerous studies and reports that show improvements to CSAT can impact company profits by as much as 25%!
    
3. Contact Center Operation Improvements: According to a Frost and Sullivan report improving First Contact Resolution (FCR) can dramatically reduce the number of repeat calls or customer inquiries; a 15% improvement to FCR can reduce inquiry volume by nearly 50%.  This allows organizations to better service net new calls, which can result in more sales and ultimately better service experiences. 
    

So, what can Five9 do to help you with your First Contact Resolution? Below are a few out of the box features that I believe Five9 has to help you in your First Contact New Year’s Resolution:  
 

Omnichannel View Of Your Customer:

When trying to improve FRC the first thing any company should think about is the customer.  Why is the customer reaching out and have they done so already?  With Five9 Omnichannel, contact centers agents have a holistic view of customers by integrating email, social, chat and voice all in one dashboard.

According to a McKinsey report, the number of digital touchpoints within the customer journey are increasing by 20% annually as more offline consumers switch to digital tools and younger, tech-savvy consumers enter the market.  As such, more conversations are happening between your customers and your brand.  Knowing how time sensitive customers are these days, when a customer reaches out it is imperative to answer their questions and solve their problem on the first contact.  Ryan Kam, CMO at Five9 and Kerry Bodine, CEO of Bodine & Co., will cover this topic in great detail in this upcoming webinar.   

Leveraging Reporting, AI and Speech Analytics:

Reporting on call frequency and average handling times, etc. are great reports for the call center.  However, these reports will not future proof your business or allow your sales and support teams to provide great customer experiences.  This is why Five9 has been talking so much about AI and the power of speech analytics within the contact center. 

Jonathan Rosenberg, CTO of Five9 commented on this last April saying:

“Five9 pipes the voice content of the call to Google, where it goes through real-time speech recognition and natural language processing. The customer’s speech is matched against a knowledge base, and the results are fed back to Salesforce Einstein. Einstein then suggests matching articles to the agent, and provides a live transcript of the call.”

To echo what Jonathan said in April, this is an industry first and a huge step forward for agent assist in the call center.  We believe that by creating these types of partnerships and integrations will allow your sales and service teams to resolve customer concerns faster and on the first interaction.

Intelligent Route Calls to the Right Agent:

Intelligent routing helps route calls to the best suited agent.  This minimizes call backs, transfers and hold times.  Not only does this increase FCR rates but it improves CSAT scores all around.  Five9 offers a suite of routing and call queue options ranging from skill-based, customer profile, to behavior-based routing.  

I hope you find this blog helpful.  If you have any specific questions on our products or services, please reach out. As mentioned in previous blog posts, we care deeply about this space and are looking to solve a number of the key pain points that surround our industry.  First Call Resolution is a key metric our platform is built to solve.  Just like how no one like waiting on hold, no one likes being transferred 12 times to get a question answered.