When BNY Mellon Shareowner Services took a look at its call center tactics, the executive team was on the lookout for typical CSR benchmarks—speedy service, productivity goals and satisfactory resolutions.
But when the analysis came back, officials noticed some anomalies. Why, for instance, were five percent of the division’s customers—many of whom were inactive, minor dividend recipients—taking up 25 to 30 percent of contact agents’ time? Why were there so many multiple calls, especially from certain callers phoning in on Fridays…and checking back the following Monday?
“We always tracked multiple calls, but assumed they didn’t get what they wanted the first time,” says Frank Madonna, COO of BNY Mellon Share Owner Services. “We also thought people only needed us when they needed to do something.”
If only. Turns out many of the extra calls were the result of simply failing the key metric of first-call resolution (FCR). It’s a problem that has long plagued call centers, which have struggled with how to keep calls, and costs, at a minimum.
BNY Mellon’s division is among a small number of centers that have begun to take seriously the need to dive deep into the matter of first-call resolution.
And that’s not just from post-call surveys to customers or agent feedback, but sophisticated, and expensive, analytical software and services. “There’s a tremendous push in call centers,” for getting issues solved the first time, rather than just quickly, says Ron Hildebrandt, co-founder and vp of call-center performance management firm Enkata. “One of the main challenges is they are beginning to sell more from the center—they’re generating hundreds of millions in sales. And if you don’t answer a question well in trying to get to that sale, your first call resolution [rate] is going to be down.”
And your costs go up, according to the Yankee Group, which estimates a $5 to $7 cost for each agent-assisted customer interaction. “It is easy to comprehend how eliminating unnecessary calls to a customer service center can save millions of dollars per year,” writes analyst Ken Landoline, a program manager in Yankee’s enterprise research group.
But first-call resolution analytics are used only “sparingly,” according to Yankee. A survey by DMG Consulting found only 14 percent adoption of commercially packaged call center management applications in North American centers.
Companies have mostly depended on less-thorough, and less costly, methods like CRM record scans and agent “self-scoring” by in-house quality assurance programs, despite their problems with subjectivity, timeliness or “sufficiently large sampling rates to ensure statistical validity,” according to Landoline’s report.
In addition, according to Yankee, about a third of all calls into centers are unnecessary repeat calls that should have been previously resolved. Research indicates up to two-thirds of contact center costs can be attributed to callbacks or issue rework efforts.
In a 2008 cross-industry study by the Ascent Group management consultancy, companies had first-call resolution rates ranging between 51 and 97 percent, with only a small majority that had been been tracking such data for the past three years.
Poor resolution rates seem hard to justify given the tools that modern banking contact centers have put in agents’ hands, such as CRM systems access that displays purchase behavior, account relationships and patterns of how the customer has previously contacted the institution (such as the Web site).
The problem is that these tools only draw upon the consumer’s macro financial behavior and immediate needs. One high-profile case study in first-call resolution is JPMorgan Chase, which utilized Enkata to improve efficiency in its card units. According to Hildebrandt, JPMorgan was looking to reduce its 80 million-plus customer calls, but had previously tried tactics such as agent feedback with little success.
Using Enkata’s SaaS deployment—which involves monitoring structured data related to the calls, not the voice traffic itself—JPMorgan brought a different light to performance metrics. For example, the card unit found that many repeat calls were a result of the call center’s structure, where disputed charges went to a particular desk. Overwhelmed workers “got 10,000 of those calls a week,” says Hildebrandt, “and that desk didn’t have 24-hour support.”
Frontline agents were behaving as instructed, but their prompt actions only meant card customers were being transferred to a voice mail, forcing the customer to call back another time—and perhaps in a less than agreeable mood. Overall, JPMorgan found nearly $8 million in cost savings from the new approach. That amount may be unique, but the experience is not. Ascent Group found 70 percent of companies that measured first-call response performance noted improvement in completion, with an average annual gain of eight to nine percent in FCR rates.
BNY Mellon Shareowner Services deployed Enkata after the 2006 exercise that uncovered some of the redundant customer interaction. Concentrating on first-call resolution means looking at the experience from the consumer perspective, not the agent’s view of a “quick, crisp service-delivery perspective,” says Madonna.
It’s attacking the small things that can make a difference. At BNY, Madonna described the problems his center had with a regular caller—or, at least a problem that nobody understood at the time.
Using Enkata software, BNY determined the man in question called the shareholder services division at least six times a year, every year, to request a reissued check to replace the one he misplaced. They weren’t of any great value—$6 to $12—but Madonna notes that the Enkata dashboard flagged the account for an intervention: to see if the absent-minded customer would rather have his check electronically deposited, or simply have the funds reinvested into his account.
“We weren’t thinking like that, and didn’t have the ability to script and train our customer service representatives for that,” he says. Before Enkata, he says, there were no red flags to find the gentleman an alternative to that check. One of the surprises in FCR analytics, Madonna says, was how little customer satisfaction correlated to first-call resolution. “We had people who regularly called us once a day, but were perfectly happy with everything. We didn’t realize we were on people’s minds that much,” Madonna says. “We just couldn’t get to the customer’s behavior.” (c) 2008 Bank Technology News and SourceMedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved. http://www.banktechnews.com http://www.sourcemedia.com
