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Original Publication: Customer Management Insight - February 2009
When a typical call lasts about 20 minutes due to the complex nature of your business, it’s no fun for customers to have to call back (or wait for a callback) to resolve their issue. With that in mind, ICBC – one of Canada’s largest auto insurance providers – decided to make first-contact resolution (FCR) the prime focus of their Dial-a-Claim center in 2008. And ICBC’s customers – and agents – couldn’t be happier about that.
Dial-a-Claim managers used strategic communication, coaching and motivational tactics to educate agents and inspire them to drive measurable FCR improvement centerwide. In fact, the contact center’s 2008 FCR rate of 83 percent – up from 75 percent in 2007 – has Dial-a-Claim hovering around the “world-class” category for this critical metric. According to the Service Quality Measurement Group (SQM) — a leader in FCR benchmarking and research — “world-class” FCR starts around 85 percent, compared to the 67 percent FCR average for the rest of the contact center industry (based on SQM research).
Preparing Staff for the First-Call Revolution
Merely wanting to move a metric is not enough; it takes a concerted effort on the part of management and, importantly, a strong commitment from engaged agents in order to achieve notable improvement with a key performance indicator like FCR. That’s why Dial-a-Claim started its FCR initiative by educating agents on the metric and its powerful impact on the overall customer experience.
“As a leadership group, we were very focused on ensuring that the staff understood the importance of FCR,” explains Geoffry Butler, manager of the claims contact center. “Line of sight was a real focus going into 2008.”
So was training and coaching. Managers and supervisors spent a lot of time showing agents ways to gain control of each call, find answers to key issues during the call and elevate the customer experience. A big part of enhancing the training and feedback agents received was the center’s implementation of a formal quality monitoring system that records all calls and enables supervisors to quickly and easily pinpoint key areas of improvement for each agent.
Just as important as the quality monitoring feedback provided by supervisors is direct feedback from customers themselves. At the start of the FCR initiative, the center began using SQM to conduct post-call surveys with customers soon after an interaction with a Dial-a-Claim agent. As part of the post-call survey, an SQM phone surveyor asks each customer (who agrees to take the survey) if their issue was fully resolved on the first contact. In addition to calculating the center’s FCR rate based on the collective survey responses, SQM provides managers and supervisors with critical feedback from customers. This feedback is then be passed on to agents during coaching sessions and used to help them improve the service they provide and their personal FCR performance.
“By going down to the [agent] level and doing the surveys,” says Kathryn Hepher, quality operations manager at ICBC, “it places more importance on each individual’s accountability for the overall customer service experience. So, as opposed to ‘what I do doesn’t matter since FCR is just a [centerwide] number, each person, because they now receive feedback direct from the customer, is able to see the impact they each have.”
Overcoming Unique Challenges
Making Dial-a-Claim’s FCR improvement particularly impressive is that the calls agents handle are rarely of a routine nature that can be quickly resolved. Agents, all of whom are highly trained claims adjusters, must go through a complex process with callers to determine liability over the phone.
“We are more complicated than most other companies,” says Butler. “Customers call us when they have auto accidents, so we handle a wide variety of contacts – often of an intense, stressful nature — 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”
Adding to the challenge is the fact that ICBC is unionized, meaning that managers cannot reward agents with financial incentives – something most centers rely on to drive improvements to key metrics. But managers didn’t let a lack of cash get in the way; instead, they poured public recognition and praise on their agents for their role in the FCR initiative.
“One of the things we did was create a four-panel ‘World-Class Wall’ that displays the names of any agents who achieve 10, 15, 20 or 25 world-class calls [based on SQMs parameters],” explains Hepher. At each of these milestones in 2008, agents received a personalized card from their supervisor as well as a personal invitation from Hepher to go and sign the wall in acknowledgement of their achievement. At the 15 and 25 world-class call milestone, agents also received a coffee card and movie tickets.
“We have a limited budget, but this type of recognition went a long way,” says Hepher, who adds that now in 2009 agents are rewarded/recognized for the percentage of world-class calls they achieve rather than the sheer number of them they compile. “That change was based on feedback from staff, who felt [using] percentages was a more fair way to mark the world-class achievement, since some people work full-time and others work only part-time.”
FCR’s Impact on Other Key Metrics
Dial-a-Claim’s FCR improvement has fostered a good feeling both internally and externally: With a frontline fully empowered to handle customer requests more efficiently and effectively than ever, the center’s agent satisfaction rate is steadily on the rise; and, naturally, the service improvements certainly have customers smiling, as well — customer satisfaction currently stands at a very enviable 97%.
But what about the center’s average handle time (AHT)? It’s a common misconception that concerted efforts to increase FCR inevitably and unfortunately lead to increases in AHT (and the costs associated with that). As Dial-a-Claim happily discovered, a solid FCR rate and an acceptable AHT are not mutually exclusive. With the center’s agents more focused on the customer than on handle time, overall AHT has “taken care of itself” because: 1) agents are able to find the right information/answer quickly since they truly listen to caller needs; and 2) callers don’t end up running up talk times with frustrated commentary about how their issue hasn’t been resolved.
“By putting the right agent behaviors in motion, our FCR has gone up and our AHT has remained well in line,” says Butler. “We set more of a range for AHT and not a strict quota so staff can focus on the customer, and it has all worked out thus far.”
As Hepher puts it, “You don’t have to spend an inordinate amount of extra time to achieve a world-class call!” •
Dial-a-Claim at a Glance
LOCATION: Surrey, British Columbia
HOURS OF OPERATION: 24 x 7 x 365
NUMBER OF AGENTS: 265
PRODUCTS/SERVICES PROVIDED/SUPPORTED: Handle all auto insurance claims for ICBC customers
CHANNELS HANDLED: Phone, some Web transactions
NUMBER OF CONTACTS HANDLED:
NOTABLE: Implemented an ambitious first-contact resolution (FCR) improvement initiative that has moved the center into world-class FCR territory while greatly enhancing both customer and agent satisfaction.
Greg Levin is Community Services Manager for ICMI. He can be reached at gregl@icmi.com.
