When you’re running a big business, it is important to keep in mind that your employees are the face of your operation. It is these employees who have direct and daily contact with your customers and come to represent the values of your brand. In that sense, the most important thing you can do to monitor their performance, is to look at your customers’ satisfaction and examine the degree of their happiness from what they encounter on the ‘front line’.
Ask the customer
One of the most effective ways is to direct your employees with this task is to simply have them ask the customers themselves. “How did we deal with your query?” gives you first-hand insight into how your team members are performing on an instance-by-instance basis, and of course the call handlers who ask the question get instant feedback on whether the level of service was up to par. For their own professional pride, if nothing else, they won’t want this conversation to be a negative one.
It’s a much more effective way of gauging performance than asking a customer to complete a survey. Often customers feel they don’t have the time to go through a survey, no matter what the benefits may be.
Assigning a customer query a particular ID also means you can track its status, as well as monitor whether it reappears, signifying that the query was not successfully answered first time around.
First Call Resolution doesn’t start with your agent
Many solutions exist in order for your business to understand the problem, and find a solution right away. For example, First Call Resolution software can track how your team deals with problems the caller may be experiencing, by using specific algorithms and speech analytics. This measure of customer service satisfaction can be delivered upon initial contact.
As soon as a customer picks up their phone, the FCR process has begun; getting through, and speaking with an agent is not the start of FCR. A customer may have tried calling outside of office hours, or may be on hold for a lengthy period of time.
Any customer contact that is missed should be monitored as part of the First Call Resolution chain. Although, the part where you begin evaluating your team’s response comes when two way contact is established.
Analytics software, using text mining and speech analytics, enables you to pinpoint particular problem areas whether they are regular issues, or poor performance by staff members. You can then be specific about the gaps in knowledge, training and expertise you must address when it comes to your team.
Get your team to self-monitor
Ask your team to note whether or not a customer query was solved inside a set period, for example, two to three days. This could be a simple checklist, which is reviewed following each interaction and being noted when a case is successfully closed.
Reviewing these checklists and comparing them with customer feedback (tracked using the unique query ID) will often reveal that your team members are harder on themselves than your customers are. If staff do care about their own personal performance, they’ll be an effective monitor of themselves.
Make sure you define exactly what you’re monitoring
When measuring First Call Resolution, it’s crucial to be clear on exactly what constitutes a successful outcome. Does ‘resolved’ mean a query has been answered? Or does it mean that, with an answer yet to be found, a customer is happy that you have taken their matter seriously and will investigate?
Analyse this
Speech analytics technology can provide a highly detailed picture of repeat call rate, and can help firms to understand why a call was unresolved after first contact. It also allows you to pinpoint the type of repeat call are handled by each agent, and, if necessary, revise service level agreements.
Social media gives you a window
Take a look at social media channels to get an outside view of how your company is perceived to deal with customer queries. We all know how brutally honest people can be online, and social media can be a good alert system. A lot of negative comments will be the result of poor performance somewhere along the line and hint at a matter that needs to be investigated.
If in the end your customers are happy, then things are running smoothly and your employees must be performing well. Monitor this to get a true gauge on how well you are performing as a workforce, rather than any vague measures you could concoct on your own.
