Devoted to the call center industry, the agents on the phones, and their managers

Sometimes resolving a customer's issue the first time they call takes concentration and determination, but it's satisfying for me.

Greg Levin in Measuring The Things That Matter says that first-call resolution just might be the most important factor in customer satisfaction. According to the SQM Group, "if the customer's issue is resolved on the first call, only 3% of those customers are at risk of defecting to your competitors -- compared to a whopping 38% of customers at risk of doing so if their issue isn't resolved on the first contact."

But how do you define "first call"? Does it mean you fixed the problem without having to transfer the customer to someone else? Or that you didn't have to write down a note to yourself to follow up later?

I got pretty good at guessing what the customer wanted within the first few seconds of the call. But those weren't the calls that were most satisfying to my customers. Especially when I worked in tech support, I tended to get the customers whose issues had most certainly not been resolved on the first call. Some of them had been calling for months and still had the same problem.

For those chronic customers, first-call resolution sometimes meant that I had to stay on the line with them as I transferred them to up to five different companies. I apologized and apologized, and sometimes the volume of the call got fainter the more the customer was transferred (ever notice that?) But I resolved not to stop until I got the problem fixed, or received a promise that it would be, along with an estimate of when that would happen.

Why did the customer have to stay on the line? Because our call center metrics would have suffered if I had hung up and followed up later. If I logged off the ACD to do it, it would have hurt our statistics. If not, another call would have rung into my phone and I wouldn't have been able to follow up. That was the way it was when I first was on the phones.

I have never understood why statistics couldn't be managed in a way that doesn't make the customer suffer. The customer doesn't care how your call center is run, as long as the issue is resolved.