First Call Resolution (FCR) is a key measure for call center operations.  It is one of the important aspects of customer experience management - call centers should be able to resolve an issue in a single call.

In the effort to continue to "resolve" all issues in the first call to the call center, Ronald Hildebrandt has a great look at how to look at the potential errors from agents that extend beyond that key first call.

Now having experienced a recent middling to poor customer care experience, I can honestly say that I am not so interested in a "first call resolution", but rather a "real resolution to my call".  Yes, I would love it if my issue could be resolved in a single call.  However, I would appreciate it more if a customer care rep would follow the advice of #10 on Hildebrandt's list:

10. Only answered the question asked, but did not anticipate the real customer issue In the healthcare world, quoting insurance benefits is one of the most complex, confusing and time-consuming activities that can take place in the call center. There are many different benefits that can be asked about and quoted. The flaw we often find in those call centers (and non-healthcare call centers, too) is that the agent only answers the question that the customer asked but doesn't anticipate the full impact of the original question.

For my telecom customer care experience, I KNEW, with a certainty, that I understood my problem better than the young man on the other end of the phone, but at no point did the rep attempt to say "Can I go research this issue and call you back?".... No.  He just continued to follow the script and attempt figure out my issue via process of elimination.  Not a great strategy....

Do you think that it is appropriate for customer care reps to "declare ignorance" and attempt to find another resolution? Or do you think that a 75 call minute call should extend into a 150 minute call while all avenues are exhausted for "first call resolution"?

Post your comments below or email (John.Myers@BlueBuffaloGroup.com) / twitter (JohnLMyers44) me directly.

NOTE - You would be surprised at how much of you taxes you can complete while on a 75 minute customer care call? ;)

I found Mike Robuck's recent article on IPTV wins in hotels and MDUs to be an oddly familiar story.  I remember lots of these types of stories coming from the IP connectivity days and the fiber to the premise days....

It has always been easier to run a single pipe to a "captured" audience rather than to enable a neighborhood or a series of rural locations.  However recent rants about bandwidth issues in hotels aside, I haven't seen too many issues getting video and connectivity service in a hotel or an MDU.  Unfortunately, when you venture outside of the northeast corridor of the United States, most of the "target market" for IPTV services is not located in MDUs.

While I don't disagree that these situations offer quick business model wins and technology test beds, I don't think that we should read too much into wins for IPTV in this "captured" audience environments.  I think that we should look to see how IPTV does in neighborhood "competitions" for the true measure of IPTV's worth.

At a recent risk conference, Apple’s Dave Moriarty talked about how waiting for chargebacks is not an efficient strategy for dealing with fraud issues with online purchases.  As more and more online purchase are being made via, on and for mobile devices; I am in “violent agreement” with him. 

In fact, I would go so far as to say that it’s not just issues of fraud that can be tracked with with the “leading” indicator of cancelled orders, but revenue assurance as well.

Being able to track not only the subscription and service orders, but premium service or mobile application orders for provisioning and cancellation are excellent methods to identify problem products and services.  While you cannot eliminate fraud and revenue assurance issues using this type of order analytics, you can understand where issues will come from and help to build controls into those products either in advance or adjustment to meet fraud and revenue assurance issues.

Where do you think the future of order analytics is going?

Post your comments below or email (John.Myers@BlueBuffaloGroup.com) / twitter (JohnLMyers44) me directly.

While I have seen recent studies that show that telecommunications connectivity will continue to be an important part of a consumer’s budget, there is now evidence that the mix of spend may change with the current economic environment.

Andrew Berg looks at a recent study for the NMRC as it relates to trends toward basic, pre-paid wireless contracts may negatively impact feature rich, post-paid wireless accounts.

I believe that this trend will have an impact on consumers with multiple telecom options such as landline and wireless phones.  However, for consumers with a single telecom option such as a full-function smartphone (ie iPhone, Storm, G1); feature rich post-paid accounts will continue to be the preferred option simply because those consumers have put so much emphasis on using those devices for overall connectivity (voice, email, web).

Where do you see the trends going?  Post your comments below or email (John.Myers@BlueBuffaloGroup.com) / twitter (JohnLMyers44) me directly.

I found Marin Perez’s analysis on Skype’s recent attempts to get carriers to enable more mobile applications on mobile phones.  Presumably, I would guess that chief among them would be Skype.

While I applaud their efforts to empower the end users of mobile devices to make their mobile devices their own, I have to ask…

Why would Verizon, AT&T, TMobile, etc encourage mobile VoIP and mobile IM applications?  Do the executives at those carriers look stupid?

Don’t get me wrong, I am sure that iPhone users and soon G1 users will figure out how to use Skype to decline their use of voice call minutes and SMS counts.  This is something that the industry cannot stop.  However asking those execs to hasten the decline of those revenue streams is a little naive on the part of Skype…. Self-serving, but naive.

What do you think about Skype’s intentions/ request?

Post your comments below or email (John.Myers@BlueBuffaloGroup.com) / twitter (JohnLMyers44) me directly.