The Global Association for Contact Center Best Practices & Networking

"Multi-Channel support helps segregate the options and try to help customer options, but can equally cause frustration with the customer as they just prefer to call by phone. FCR can increase and also offer false stats as all they really are doing is pushing contacts through the other option. Multichannel contact is fine providing the customer audience is happy with the options."

"Multi-channel does not affect FCR at this point as agents are delivered contacts simultaneously, however voice calls take precedence."

"Similar metrics for both email and telephone channels with the agent's span of control is taken into consideration when measuring FCR. In addition to internal agent performance evaluations, we also leverage FCR customer surveys to help us understand if we've addressed the customer issues from the customer's perspective."

"FCR is improved, but for voice channels the normal service level and abandon rates still apply."

"I reckon it does affect the FCR but not by much. Rather we could use multichannel to improve the FCR. We have traditionally tied FCR to voice channel, where we have a dialogue between customer and agent - this gives ample time and opportunity to achieve FCR.

I see that voice is being slowly replaced by web chat, text chat, IM. These channels could definitely provide better FCR percentage, due to its dialogue presence, the issues can be sorted out. In fact, The new technologies like SMS, fax or other channels have less or 0 % dialogue presence - that makes the FCR unachievable.

In this case, it is necessary that mid-level management (with the assistance of top-level management) should come up with a set of rules that defines FCR for multiple channels.

In addition, as mentioned above, it is also important that the infrastructure is well built to avoid back and forth and reduction of FCR percentage."

"Chat has the best FCR - over 90%, where email only has 50%"

"We found an application that keeps the communication response and resolution times within our KPIs"

"Yes, on two fronts. The better the view of the customer, the more likely that resolution will be obtained during the first contact. Analyzing, segmenting and scoring customer data allows for more personalized communication and a range of resolution steps. Delivering communications in the medium preferred by the customer also increases likelihood of resolution."

- Paven Bratch, Global Minacs Marketing Solutions Leader, Aditya Birla Minacs, India

"Voice and Email are the minimum requirements in my view, anything additional like chat or text is a bonus and nice to have for clients that prefer this type of communication type."

"We work in an organization where people arrive from many countries. We have 90 languages in school. 48 % of 82 000 people come from other countries. We have support from 500 translators to help all these people out with the right information."

"I think that the different modes of communication allow more information to be gleaned to help with better, more relevant service delivery that matches the client's needs. It is however important to define time limits for pick-up/collection times and response times for secondary communications, which helps retain customer expectations and deliver excellent service."

"Absolutely it affects our FCR metric but basically, it's the same. If the affiliate is contacting us back for the same issues, no matter what channel they use, we measure the contact."

"Any channel which requires that a client be called back runs the risk of the client not being reachable at that time. Alternative measures need to be implemented to monitor the success rate of these contacts. E-mail contact is time consuming and requires a fair amount of back and forth contact."

"First Contact Resolution is just one of the metrics, as is the increasing requirement to drive new sources of revenue through the interaction channels. While conserving costs is critical in these difficult economic times, clients are looking for opportunities to increase revenues on a per contact basis."

"That would depend on how it is being used. In our case, in some respects, yes as dealing with back office order management and email communications can prevent (unwanted) call volumes."

"At the beginning the FCR, AHT and AWT (of course Service Level) are affected. For voice we are using the traditional ones and for e-mail we are using: no of presented e-mails, average waiting time, average response time, longest response time, no of e-mails put back in the waiting queue"

"Multi-channel does affect our overall FCR measurements. First Contact Resolution is very easily definable for voice as 'the percentage of calls whose reason for calling was addressed and solved on the first contact into the contact center.' We currently measure FCR as follows:

• Call statistic calculations (internal measure)
• Call quality monitoring (internal determination)
• Customer satisfaction surveys (external measure)

FCR is used by Abtran to improve our operational efficiency and also to find methods to drive down our costs. We would like to accurately measure across all of our channels in order to define whether or not the customer feels their issue has been resolved regardless of how they contact us."

"The more channels for communication there are, the more chances for Agents to be deluged with queries and hence miss SLAs and not be able to ensure solid FCR averages"

"This is related to the response to Q4. Some channels are more suitable for collecting more and finer grain information."

"FCR, abandoned rate, GOS,SLA's for each back office dept, ditto orders of all types.
Email response times, query call back times."

"First call resolution is one element and dimension that is affected. But since the technologies are all different, the threshold and parameters are also variant. Quality of service and QA parameters also are imperative."

"Multi-channel currently tracks at a lower raw FCR, due to the types of incidents and service requests that come in via web and email. We are an IT Help Desk."

"Account/order numbers are collected for each contact type, then cross matched to all data sets to determine frequency of contact per issue."

"It could, especially if multi-channels are used, repeated contacts, for a single problem.
Metrics are somewhat consistent across channels, but reported separately.

Messages Received
Messages Responded
Messages Resolved

TOTAL # of Chats Received
TOTAL # of Chats Responded
Chats Abandoned
SL%
ABD%
Avg. Wait Time (sec)
Average Handle Time (sec)

Calls Received
Calls Answered
Calls Abandoned
SL% ( 45 s)
ABD%
ASA (sec)
AHT (sec)
MAX DELAY (min) - ANS"

"Calls tend to be moved to call management software package and then assessed. Staff is assessed on incoming calls they resolve in one issue, and total call resolutions. Any that are logged will go against total call resolutions only."