FCR, and Real-Time Guidance

 

Taylor Reach recently helped to sponsor the ContactBabel Inner Circle Guide to FCR (First Contact Resolution). This comprehensive report provides insight into the current state of FCR and will prove to be a valuable tool as you examine your FCR practices within your customer-facing contact centers.

You can download the ContactBabel Inner Circle guide to FCR https://thetaylorreachgroup.com/the-inner-circle-guide-to-first-contact-resolution

Lastly, I recently did a webinar on scripting and real-time guidance for Customer Contact Central. If you are interested you can access the recording here https://www.customercontactcentral.com/frs/22041151/top-industry-secrets-for-successful-contact-center-scripting/email

Understanding your Contact Center Costs: FCR

 

By Colin Taylor

Contact centers are always striving to improve efficiency, increase customer satisfaction and deliver a superior customer experience. Technology is frequently the strategy employed to achieve this goal. While technology can certainly support improvement in all three areas, improvement can also be realized through increasing First Contact Resolution or FCR.

FCR is a contact center performance metric that identifies the center’s ability to resolve an inquiry on the first attempt. While not a true measure of customer satisfaction, as the customer is not always asked if they are satisfied, or if the interaction met their need, it is nonetheless indicative of satisfaction for both your customers and your agents.

Whenever anyone reaches out to a contact center, they are looking to get “something done.” Completing that “something” to the satisfaction of the customer is resolving the reason for the inquiry. That is why contact centers exist, to resolve questions, issues, and inquiries. Those who can get what they want to get done, on a call or interaction will tend to be more satisfied than those who don’t. So, the higher your first contact resolution rate, the higher the satisfaction levels you will tend to see from those customers.

There are a number of ways to measure FCR. The simplest READ MORE

Advanced Contact Center Metrics: Speed to Competency

 By Colin Taylor

Having their best agents poached by other departments is a common refrain from contact center operators. These center leaders do not have any issue with upward mobility of their staff, in fact they likely support it as it offers the opportunity for advancement within the organization which can be a motivating factor.

No, the reason for the lament is simple math. New staff cannot perform at the same level as experienced staff. We all know intuitively that it takes time and attention for new staff fresh from their onboarding to mature into competent agents. Heck, when an agent graduates from training they are about as poor a performer as you will find. They are barely adequate to perform the role, and this is a far cry from the competent staff we are asking them to replace. It will take time, training, coaching and support to assist the adequate agent to complete the journey to competent.

“Competent” we would define as the point where agents are independent, require little support, perform well in all metrics.

There is a cost to the center to replace an experienced agent with a newbie who 
READ MORE

Taylor Reach NPS Score +100

 

By: Colin Taylor

Customer Satisfaction is critical for the success of any organization, and Taylor Reach is no different. Each member of the team strives to delight our customers and exceed their expectations.

To gauge the satisfaction of our clients we employ a customer satisfaction survey and all of our clients are asked to participate and complete a survey.

The results we achieved so far in 2016 have blown us away… our NPS[1] score is an impressive +100, a perfect score! This score is truly remarkable as “a Net Promoter Score of +30% is truly excellent” for B2B firms according to Deep Insight. Circle Research has indicated that score of +35 is the top quartile of all B2B NPS scores.

Thank you to all of clients that participated in this survey. We are delighted and honored to have our customers give us this vote of confidence. We will continue to work hard to earn and retain your trust and patronage.

Colin

October 7, 2016

UPDATE:

It has been almost 6 years since I published our attainment of a perfect 100 NPS score. Since then a lot has changed in the contact center customer service and customer experience industry, we have seen the pandemic drive work-from-home, technologies that we could only imagine in 2016 become realities in 2022. 

But one thing hasn't really changed....Our clients still love us, since we began tracking NPS in2015 our scores have never been below 88, and as of today stands at 91!

We appreciate our client faith and trust in us. We appreciate the positive NPS score and know that this score reflects their satisfaction with our services and with the positive changes and improvements that they have been able to achieve with a little help from Taylor Reach.

Colin

September 15, 2022

[1] Net Promoter® and NPS® are registered trademarks and Net Promoter System^SM and Net Promoter Score^SM are trademarks of Bain & Company, Satmetrix Systems and Fred Reichheld

via The Taylor Reach Group Inc. http://ift.tt/2dky994

Understanding Your Contact Center Costs: Training

Sometimes it seems inevitable that every time a budget is approved with funds allocated for new, additional, or improved training, something occurs and the training is the first thing removed from the budget. We have heard this refrain many times over the years. From the perspective of senior management, Training looks like a safe place to cut:

“We will be no worse off by cutting here than were are today.”

I would agree that this statement is true. However, if you are bleeding, staunching the wound might be a better approach than the status quo of continued bleeding.

Training, coaching, and personal development must be viewed as an investment. Only seeing the cost side of the equation is a common blind spot. It is not about the upfront cost; it should be about the downstream benefit.

Typically, when we think about the cost associated with new agent onboarding training we think of the trainer, the training room, the students being trained, and the cost of each of these. The Trainer for...
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Understanding Your Contact Center Costs: Attrition

A recent report from Gartner[1] referenced the cost to replace a frontline agent at $14,113. We have seen similar figures when working with clients. A major municipality that we have worked with, shared that their cost is just over $10,000. While this cost seems high, it is likely too low. When we look at the cost to replace an experienced agent we must include costs that arise in four major categories:

1. Recruitment & Hiring costs
2. Training costs
3. Lost productivity costs
4. Reduction in quality costs / Potential revenue (there is also potential to damage organization reputations but for now we are only including the internal costs).

Recruitment costs include the cost to place or post the position, human support to review applicants, the time it takes to administer any assessments or tests and the cost of the tests themselves, candidate interviews, background, and criminal checks, drug tests, etc. There are then the hiring costs, setting up a new employee into your systems, acquiring licenses, registering them in the benefits program, etc. This cost varies by organization, some employ more automation than others and some may complete this process largely internally while others outsource the entire process. Our research has shown that a reasonable estimate of this cost is...READ MORE

SHOULD YOUR CONTACT CENTER BE BEST PRACTICE?

By Colin Taylor

We constantly hear about “best practices,” and these are held up as the shining examples of what the best organizations do. The desire for us to want our organization or contact center to be “the best” can be a heady goal and many blindly start down the road to get their organization to be a “best practices” organization. But is this the best approach for your contact center, your staff, or your organization?

Best practice is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a procedure that has been shown by research and experience to produce optimal results and that is established or proposed as a standard suitable for widespread adoption.” This certainly sounds like a worthwhile goal, but as with many other things, the devil can be in the details.

Best practices may be validated by “research or experience,” but are the organizations researched like your organization? Is the “experience” relevant to your contact center and your organization? Too often the companies establishing and being referenced as “best practice” are leading performers in their sector or well regarded for the service they deliver. They tend to be organizations that have mature and robust service operations. s that similar to your contact center?

Contact centers operate in an ecosystem where people, processes, and technologies interact to deliver service to customers and prospects. There are high levels of interconnection and inter-dependencies woven throughout the contact center. This is why centers are often described as having “thousands of moving parts.” This lattice of interconnected and interdependent activities, processes, and workflows complicate initiatives to make changes in this environment. Striving to implement a best practice in one area will often bump into a number of pre-requisite activities that need to be completed before said “best practice” can be actioned. This is a difficult and complicated task, and even if it is successful, it will often fail to secure the expected benefits as other areas in the operation lack the maturity or robustness to properly support the attainment of the new “best practice.”

In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins said, “good is the enemy of great,” and this is an accepted truth. If you are only striving for good, you may waste, time, effort and dollars pursuing an objective that may yield little more than what you had achieved as a good operation. This is the Pareto principle (commonly known as the 80/20 rule) in action. In contact centers, the same rationale can hold true. Most contact centers and most organizations stop at good, or in many cases “good enough.”

There needs to be a “bang for the buck” financial evaluation when considering implementing best practices. How will becoming “best practice” change the center or organization’s performance in the eyes of the customers or of leadership?

The costs to implement and the benefits achieved through best practices are not equal for all organizations as they will depend upon the starting point in terms of maturity as well as the vertical you are serving. Technology investments to support best practices may be “table stakes” in one industry and the rare exception in another. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. The cost should not be the only consideration, but it needs to be a part of the decision-making process.

While a “best practice” may have been shown to produce optimal results, the cost to achieve these optimal results may not make sense or be appropriate for all centers. It is important not to view “best practices” as exclusive of other improvement opportunities. There may be a few best practices that you can implement, but there will be a considerably larger list of “better” practices that are available to you.

The best practices that are accessible and that will improve the operation of a center will be related to the center maturity and current operating practices, structure, and available technologies. The same is true for better practices. We encourage every center not to consider this as a binary choice between becoming best practice or not, but rather as a journey from the current state to best or most appropriate practices. This journey is reflected in an iterative process of constantly employing better practices.

Follow Taylor Reach and Colin Taylor on Twitter at @Taylor_Reach and @colinsataylor.

To find out more about how Taylor Reach can help your company with contact center best practices, CLICK HERE to schedule a free consultation.

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