Your customers don’t call your IT help desk to resolve their technical issues. They call to resolve their technical issues immediately.
Your customers want you to resolve their issues on the first call as often as possible. So, if you want to deliver outstanding help desk services, you need to look at your First Call Resolution Rate (FCR).
Here’s what it is, what it’s not, why it matters so much … and how to improve yours.
First Call Resolution Rate is a metric that indicates the proportion of support requests that your help desk agents resolve during the first call that users make to your help desk.
Let’s dive a little deeper:
When your help desk resolves IT support requests on the first call, you improve productivity, increase sales, optimize payroll, reduce costs, and plenty more.
One thing to remember about your FCR rate is that you must never evaluate it in isolation. Your FCR rate measures your performance on the first call, not your overall efficiency and not your cost-effectiveness.
Your FCR rate doesn’t tell you anything about the types of tickets you are resolving. If you are resolving most calls quickly and with your first tier, they are likely simple issues.
If, however, most FCR calls involve escalation and a lot of time, that’s a red flag, indicating your agents may not be well-equipped to handle the complexity of your users’ IT issues.
Your FCR rate tells you the percentage of requests you resolved during the first call, but not how much those requests cost you to resolve.
For example, complex issues take longer to resolve because they are escalated. This escalation drives up your cost per ticket. The higher cost per ticket impacts your staff's ability to handle the workload. Ouch. Always compare your Average Cost Per Ticket with your FCR rate.
If you notice you aren’t resolving as many help desk requests during the first call as you’d like to, look for the common causes of low FCR rates—and then remedy them.
One of the leading causes of low FCR rates is agents who do not establish the nature of a technical issue early on in the call. They assume wrong, and so an issue that could be resolved in one call takes two or more calls, all because the first agent didn’t take the time and energy to understand the issue.
Your help desk is in the repetition business. Your agents answer the same questions and troubleshoot the same issues, day in, and day out. So put that in writing. Document all processes.
Make sure your agents follow your documented processes. Common requests resolved in the same way improve your FCR rates by reducing the need to place follow-up calls to your customers.
Make sure your agents document what they do and the troubleshooting steps they take. Add these steps to your knowledge for use by other agents. The right answers, easily found, empower your agents to resolve issues the first time around.
Your First Call Resolution rate isn’t the only metric you must measure, monitor, and manage, but it’s close. If you want to improve worker productivity, increase sales, optimize payroll, and eliminate inefficiencies company-wide, your FCR rate is a good place to start. Boosting your FCR rate improves your cost of support.
If you need help calculating the cost of your help desk, check out our Help Desk Cost Calculator.