Organisations focusing on FCR can best enhance the customer experience and increase retention.
Dimension Data, a $3.8 billion leading IT solutions and services provider, today announced findings from the company's 2008 Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report, which revealed that organizations focusing on first call resolution and other "one and done" service fundamentals can best enhance the customer experience and increase retention.
The report, which includes survey results from 300 contact centers in 36 countries across five continents, revealed that 38% of contact center managers believe that a contact center agent's ability to resolve a query during the first call is the most important factor in service improvement, while 74% rated it among the top three factors for improving and enhancing service.
Reducing wait times before customer calls are answered was considered to have the second-greatest impact on improving service, with 47% of participants rating average speed to answer as one of the top three ways to improve the customer experience. Furthermore, honing agent communication and service skills was ranked third in importance, with 34% of participants citing this item among their top three service improvement indicators.
"This year's survey confirms that when the basic service components are firmly in place, customer service improves, and client retention accelerates," said Alex George, Dimension Data spokesperson for the Benchmarking Report. "A careful examination of customer service fundamentals is essential to forging lasting, positive impressions with one's customer base. First impressions last, and they lay the foundation for customer loyalty and repeat business."
The 2008 report also identifies contact centers' perceptions of customer needs and discusses what contact centers actually focus their costs and energy on. Specifically, 90.1% of the contact centers surveyed stated that reducing abandon rates was the most common metric for success. Sixty-three percent of centers use first call resolution as a performance target.
"Although agent turnover rates have escalated since Dimension Data issued its first Benchmarking Report in 1997 -- with a 92.9% increase in annual agent attrition over the past decade -- the basic premise of doing things right the first time still rings true," said George. "In the ongoing effort to reduce operating costs, contact centers should consider replacing outdated phone systems and technology infrastructure with more efficient software- and IP- based solutions, but they simply cannot afford to slash budgets when it comes to proper agent training."
* Source: Street Insider - www.streetinsider.com
