IT Help Desk Metrics - First Contact Resolution Report
This is a trend customer service report showing the percentage of total service requests resolved by the Customer Service team over time. With this trend report, you are able to see your progress toward your goals.
Customer feedback surveys also have the potential to find out whether issues are ultimately resolved to the customers' satisfaction. Internal measurement can only assume, by the lack of a repeat contact, that the issue was resolved. You really don't know for sure if it was resolved or if the customer just gave up, unless you ask the customer. And the timing of when you do ask the customer is important too—has everything happened that needed to happen to resolve the problem?
Internal FCR metrics are necessary for root cause analysis and process streamlining. Call quality FCR determinations and FCR call stats are great for identifying training and coaching needs, and process improvement opportunities. Most CRM systems facilitate the tracking of customer contact. That is after all the goal of a customer relationship management system—to know everything possible about customers and their interaction with the company. Other customer support systems may not be structured to so easily track and measure contacts and resolution.
Agent logging can also gather FCR performance by contact type, however it's really not appropriate for measuring individual agent performance due to the built in bias of agents determining whether the contacts they handled were resolved or not. If you do use agent-driven measurement, audit the results periodically and/or use it in combination with other measures, such as a customer satisfaction measure of FCR and a call quality monitoring measure of FCR.
Repeat-call calculations, agent logging and tick sheets, and call quality-monitoring determinations are all approximations of customer experience. Most companies have found that internal first contact resolution measures are overstated—the customer's view of first contact resolution is usually lower than an internal measurement. In other words, don't get too comfortable with your measurement of your performance, ask your customers too. If you're primarily relying on internal measures, use customer feedback periodically to calibrate your performance.
Keep in mind that internal metrics are more prone to manipulation and may be more self-serving, depending upon how the data is collected, the scope, the qualifying window, repeat-call calculation definition, and subjectivity of the determination. Internal metrics are also subject to data integrity issues due to the difficulty of collecting and manually categorizing the data.
Download the webinar slides: Metrics For IT Help Desk & Customer Service Organizations