This piece was authored by Eryc Eyl. Eryc is a senior solution director at E Source, with more than a decade of experience helping utilities help their customers. He’s a speaker, author of Stop Engaging Employees: Start Making Work More Human, and a Certified Customer Experience Professional.
Over the past several years, I’ve been working on first-call resolution (FCR) with multiple utilities across the US and Canada. Some utilities wanted to make it part of incentive pay, some wanted to compare their performance to other utilities, and all wanted to increase it.
The trouble with measuring FCR
Using FCR presents numerous challenges for utility contact centers. One of the problems I spent months ironing out with utilities was simply agreeing to a standard method for measuring it. While we can all agree that only a customer can say if their issue was “resolved,” we can also agree that customer surveys with small sample sizes and low response rates aren’t exactly a robust method for measuring something that affects someone’s paycheck.
We’ve decided that using operational data from our phone systems is a better way to measure FCR. But we’re still left with measurement difficulties and questions like:
- Within what time period is it acceptable for a customer to call the utility again?
- If a customer calls the utility for a different reason within that period, should it count against its metric?
- How do utilities account for the problems they expect to require multiple calls?
From resolution to repeat calls
While we focus on the metric and argue over how to measure it, we’re not doing enough to manage it. We’re in danger of losing sight of the true goal: decreasing the cost to serve and increasing customer satisfaction. If we can focus on why some customers call multiple times, we can make more progress and more-meaningful improvements.
It’s time to shift our emphasis from increasing FCR to decreasing repeat calls. This isn’t a new idea. Filomena Gogel, president of Research and Advisory at E Source, has long advocated for this shift, citing its impact on both cost and customer satisfaction. And it isn’t just a matter of wording. This shift can inform a different—and more successful—approach to both efficiency and effectiveness in the utility contact center.
Repeat calls are easier to measure
Repeat calls are easier to measure, especially if we commit to simplicity. At its core, the repeat-calls metric simply reflects the number of times a given customer calls a utility in a given period. It doesn’t consider the reason for the call. This data is easy to extract from the phone system and analyze.
But there’s also the thorny topic of “resolution,” especially as it pertains to one of the utility contact center’s most-common call types: high-bill complaints. No doubt your agents follow well-written scripts and clearly defined processes when they receive one of these calls. They help the customer understand why the bill is high. They advise the customer about ways to save money, alternative billing programs, and payment arrangements. But in most cases, agents can’t turn a high bill into a low one. So is the customer’s issue “resolved?”
This isn’t the only example of when a “resolution” might be out of reach. Something similar can occur with outages. Unless the agent can magically restore power, the issue won’t be “resolved” in the customer’s opinion, despite the agent’s best efforts to explain the cause of the outage and provide an estimated time of restoration.
Utilities can manage, not just measure
But if we begin to measure—and, more importantly, manage—repeat calls, these situations might look different.
Most utilities know that a minority of their customers ever call, and even a smaller group calls repeatedly. To reduce the number of repeat calls, we’ll need to go back to the basics of customer experience (CX) and get to know these customers. Ask:
- “What needs are customers meeting by calling us repeatedly?”
- “What are their concerns or fears?”
- “How might we meet those needs, address those concerns, or allay those fears while avoiding calls?”
- “How can we equip, enable, and empower agents so that one call doesn’t become two or ten?”
- “How might we use what we know about our customers to predict when they’re likely to call?”
- “What actions can we take in the contact center or across the utility to meet their needs before they even have the chance to pick up the phone?”
Reducing repeat calls isn’t a matter of a having a scripted close to every call, it’s not about getting just the right metric definition, and it isn’t even a matter of changing agent behavior. It brings us back to the core disciplines of CX management: customer understanding, experience design, and continuous improvement.
Add repeat calls to your metrics menu
Should we make reducing repeat calls part of incentive pay? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Modern workplaces often assume that incentives are the path to peak performance—a topic for another time. But for now, let’s just see what we can learn by focusing on repeat calls. We don’t have to stop measuring FCR right away. In fact, it might be best to keep an eye on both metrics at first. Take the time to see how they relate and diverge and how they inform our actions.
Are there tradeoffs in shifting from FCR to repeat calls? Certainly. Are benchmarks of repeat call rates readily available? Probably not. Is FCR a more customer-centric metric? Debatable.
But the future of utility CX doesn’t lie in the 19th-century assembly-line mentality of yesterday’s contact center. We won’t transform the customer experience simply by measuring and scripting it. There isn’t a paint-by-numbers solution to balance customer satisfaction and cost reduction in the contact center.
The future of utility CX requires knowing our customers and understanding their needs. It requires not just responding to needs but anticipating and meeting them. We can get there by measuring FCR, but we’ll get there faster, cheaper, and with better outcomes for customers by managing repeat calls.
