Which Contact Center KPI is More Powerful — Average Handle Time or First Call Resolution?

According to a recent survey, 78% of customer service professionals are tracking at least one performance metric at work. But are they tracking the right metrics?

Most companies track higher-level key performance indicator (KPI) metrics include like:

• Customer Effort Score (CES)
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CES)

However, there are also numerous scoring methods that take you deeper into each specific point of contact. Which ones will give your customers the best experience? The two I’m going to focus on today are Average Handle Time (AHT) and First Call Resolution (FCR).

Average Handle Time — AHT

AHT is defined by how long a conversation takes. It should include:

• Call or chat initiation
• Hold and talk time
• Call or chat end
• Additional work done once the conversation has concluded

This metric is calculated by dividing the total time of all calls/chats taken by a contact center over a certain period of time (including conversation, hold, and follow-up) by the total number of all calls/chats taken by the contact center.

One interesting thing to note is that some customer service centers count parts of this process as KPIs on their own. For example, the time spent talking to customers can be counted as Average Talk Time (ATT) and follow-up work can be counted as After Call Work (ACW). To keep things simple, however, we’ll look at AHT as covering the full process.

Read: Scoring the Customer Experience: NPS vs CSAT vs CES

AHT Pros: A shorter call can be less costly for the contact center. The shorter the duration of the call, the more calls an agent can handle over a specified period of time.

AHT Cons: This metric puts company requirements before customer needs. People who contact the customer service department don’t care if a call takes five minutes or six. They just want their issues resolved with as little effort as possible.

It is not uncommon for agents rated on ACW to cut off or transfer customers that might skew their results (for example, people with more complex issues who requires longer conversations). If conversations end without issues being resolved, there are often callbacks from the same customers about the same issues.

Moreover, often customer service agents don’t do after call work, follow up with customers, or keep promises made to customers. After all, while those actions would positively impact customer experience, they would negatively impact AHT numbers.

First Call Resolution — FCR

FCR asks a fairly straightforward question: Can customer service agents resolve customers’ issues the first time they contact the organization?

To calculate FCR, start by monitoring the total number of contacts (across all channels — call, chat, email, etc.) over a specified period of time. Then you can calculate the number of customer issues solved during first contact as a percent of the total number of customer contacts.

Pros: Customers only contact the contact center once with their issues. Customer service agents can take the time they need to properly answer customer questions, which increases customer satisfaction. Even better, happy customers are often more open to upsells than those who have to call multiple times with the same question.

In addition, resolving issues the first time customers call improves customer experience and increases customer loyalty. Why is this important? It’s all about customer retention. The cost of acquiring a new customer is about 10 times the cost of keeping an existing customer.

Read: Customer Experience: Show Customers Love at Every Stage

Cons: While people might want their questions answered with great speed, FCR doesn’t necessarily do this. It places the focus more on answering questions the right way as opposed to as quickly as possible. Therefore, the length of a call will likely go up.

In addition, calculating FCR can be complex if you take into account more contact points than just phone calls. However, if you don’t do so, your result is not entirely accurate.

Also, some questions are very complex or require research before they can be resolved. In that case, FCR is not possible.

What Can Negatively Impact ACW and FCR?

Both ACW and FCR can be negatively impacted by lack of or improper customer service agent training. An improperly set up agent desktop, as well as slowdowns or breakdowns in the interactive voice response system (IVR), customer relationship management system (CRM), or other parts of the computer system, can also be bad for customer experience and KPIs. They can result in challenges in finding customer information or answering questions.

Both KPIs can also be affected by taking the time to listen to and answer people’s questions. The difference is that while AHT is negatively impacted by spending extra time with customers, FCR is positively impacted.

Read: The Shocking ROI of Improving Customer Service

In addition, customer service agents working to AHT may want to fix issues for the customer rather than teaching customers to fix issues themselves. After all, that’s a faster way to close the conversation down. However, the result is that customers will call back later if they encounter the issue again — a result that FCR discourages.

Let’s take a person who has an issue paying a bill online. The agent might handle the issue for the customer. Then next month, the customer would call back again to pay the next bill. However, if the customer service agent were to teach the customer how to pay the bill online, the customer could handle bill pay process himself from there on out.

Bots are one more item that can impact both AHT and FCR. With artificial intelligence (AI), customers can get answers to straightforward questions (like the hours of a company or where to find an item). When these types of questions are handled without requiring the intervention of a customer service agent, those issues that do reach agents are likely to be more complex and require more time. This might mean that AHT goes up (questions are less likely to be answered with a short answer) and FCR might be more difficult (requests will be more complex and may require additional research).

One way to assist with this last issue is to assure that your customer success agents are well educated in the types of situations customers might encounter. That means no reading off of scripts. Instead, in order to achieve FCR, agents must be able to think on their feet and understand where to do the research to find the answers that customers require.

Customer Experience: Win the Battle or Win the War

AHT can provide short-term savings to an organization. Creating an atmosphere of positive customer experiences, on the other hand, provides long-term gains: happier customers, deeper customer loyalty, positive online reviews, greater opportunities for upsells, and more.

Read: Customer Success — Discovering the Missing Piece

One way to help improve the customer experience is to ensure that customers and agents can quickly understand what the other is talking about. Here are a few quick hints to help make that happen:

• Test — Consistently test your contact center technologies end-to-end to ensure that everything is working together without glitches.
• Train — Don’t let your agents read off scripts. Instead, train them to ask the appropriate questions, give customers the space they need to cover all of their issues, and become knowledgeable so they can quickly solve even complicated issues.
• Invest in the right tools — For instance cobrowse — sharing a browser view — is a great way to enable agents to instantly view issues in real-time and collaboratively solve problems.

The Age of Customer Experience

Ultimately, AHT puts the focus on length of contact instead of quality of contact. To get the most out of your contact center, consider the complete customer journey. Metrics like FCR allow you to put your customers’ needs first, to keep your customers coming back for more.

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About Me

Named one of New England’s Top 40 Influencers in Content and Digital Marketing, Holly fully understands the power of online engagement. She is passionate about implementing marketing strategies that result in quick growth, rapid revenue, and happy customers. She runs marketing for Glance Networks, whose integrated cobrowse, screen share, and agent video platform has taken the customer experience industry by storm. She has been quoted in a variety of major publications and is a regular contributor to Forbes, Maximize Social Business, Business2Community, and VentureFizz. In the past, she has worked for a variety of high tech companies, as well as spearheaded her own marketing consulting firm. She’s also not afraid to embrace her nerdy side (as evidenced by her love of Neil Gaiman and her “talking” TARDIS).