What improved first call resolution meant to a major retail chain
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Malls may not be the popular destination they once were, but if you’ve visited one recently, one retail location was probably hopping: Lids. The Indianapolis-based athletic retailer operates stores worldwide, efficiently satisfying the demand for the latest ball caps and other team apparel.
Like all retailers, Lids uses technology to simplify sales and customer service, maintaining a help desk to support store employees when a problem crops up. The help desk’s goal is to deliver a solution as quickly as possible so the customer who’s being helped (and the folks in line) don’t have to wait for an uncomfortably long time.
Most people are able to wait two to three minutes on hold before being irritated, and the average call center hold time is about 13 minutes. However, 57% of customers find that long hold times are a frustrating part of their service experience. That’s why Netfor uses the call center industry standard for service level, which is 80/20, where we will answer 80% of a client’s inbound calls in less than 20 seconds.
Our industry refers to solving the issue during the first call as FCR, or first call resolution. Handling those help desk calls internally, Lids was able to achieve FCR about 60% of the time. While that’s an impressive level of service, it meant that 40% of calls—two in every five—dealt with issues that couldn’t be solved by the technical service agent who answered. Instead, those issues had to be escalated to the company’s second tier of support, which took extra time, pulled technical staff away from their regular tasks, and too often led impatient customers to abandon their purchases or place in line.
When a store employee encounters an issue, the responding agent swiftly consults a database on the problem for its resolution. This method follows a logical and straightforward approach.
Knowing an improvement in FCR would boost both customer and store employee satisfaction, along with reducing the loss of sales to those waiting customers, Lids management explored solutions and chose to outsource the first-tier handling to Netfor’s technical service team.
The Netfor team reviewed calls that weren’t resolved on the initial attempt, uncovering notable patterns. Conversations with Lids’ internal team unveiled that numerous articles in the database were created by the company’s technical staff, presuming users had a similar level of expertise.
For instance, technicians assumed users knew to restart the device as the first step in resolving a common issue. However, this assumption led to complications when customers described the solution to agents, resulting in escalations.
In response to learning why the escalations were happening, Netfor was able to start increasing the first call resolution rate by improving the articles agents were accessing. Almost immediately, Lids saw its FCR begin to climb. Within six months, the chain was averaging close to 88% FCR—a whopping 47% increase in issues resolved during the first call. That meant significantly fewer calls being escalated and even fewer store employees and customers becoming frustrated.
Companies that are frustrated by a lower-than-expected FCR for technical or other customer service calls will find four valuable lessons in our experience with Lids:
- While having the right agents is important, the quality of the knowledge available to those agents is even more critical.
- Knowledge articles should be styled consistently, in-depth, sparing no details. This will ensure all steps are addressed before an escalation has to be made.
- Issues that occur frequently require careful evaluation, beginning from the point at which the problem can’t be resolved. The team needs to determine what’s happening and how they can head off those escalations.
- There needs to be a feedback loop for knowledge articles that fail to make the solution easy and straightforward.
Think those are simple and obvious steps? We do, but we’re convinced ignoring them is the cause behind the abysmal FCR statistics earned by so many companies. Time and time again, we’ve seen the impact of those simple and obvious steps as they help our partners rack up happier customers and, in the end, bigger sales.