Improving first contact resolution is a critical initiative for any organization trying to drive better customer experience or reduce operational costs. First contact resolution (First Contact Resolution) initiatives have emerged as some of the highest impact in service performance management, and for good reason. They not only increase overall customer satisfaction, but also significantly reduce costs by deflecting future calls.

Yet First Contact Resolution continues to be one of the most difficult measures for service operations to accurately calculate and act on throughout the organization. The techniques for measuring First Contact Resolution vary from sampling recording interactions, to leveraging customer surveys, to computationally-intensive transactional analytics. For this latter approach, the rewards and challenges can be the greatest. But poor data availability, complexity in determining contact reasons and tagging repeat contacts (ranging from agent dispositioning to data mining and enrichment) and obstacles in resolving customer identities across different interaction channels challenges organizations' ability of getting an accurate measure of first contact resolution. Further, setting common individual front-line metrics and goals across service, retail and partner channels is even more difficult.

Merced’s First Contact Resolution solution tackles all of these challenges. Merced First Contact Resolution leverages Merced Intelligence and Merced Performance Suite, enabling organizations to approach First Contact Resolution in a holistic, automated and cost effective way. Merced Intelligence offers the tools organizations need to approach First Contact Resolution both at the operational and individual level. Further, Merced Intelligence provides customers with an accurate view using any number of data sources and a range of measurement alternatives from post call surveys and speech analytics to interaction analytics. But uncovering call reasons and measuring First Contact Resolution are not enough. Merced Performance Suite delivers the closed loop processes necessary to drive front-line behavior by tracking, reward and incent individual employee activities, and automate supervisor coaching, all resulting in improved First Contact Resolution.

First Contact Resolution - Benefits

• Identify customer contact trends and fix issues quickly
• Uncover true call reason and type to inform improvement campaigns
• Drive front line behaviors that promote First Contact Resolution
• Align your environment with industry leading best practices for First Contact Resolution
• Allow business users to quickly update individual incentives to ensure they align with First Contact Resolution strategies

First Contact Resolution - Features

• Analytic applications to support all First Contact Resolution calculation methods
• Data integration, data enrichment, call tagging, and caller identity resolution
• Tracking and measurement of customer journey and interaction across all channels
• Root cause analysis capabilities to identify drivers of repeat contacts
• Frontline performance management with the broadest, most complete capabilities in dashboarding and reporting to increase self-correction
• Frontline performance management to deliver improvement campaigns across the organization, including First Contact Resolution coaching and best practice sharing
• Incentive Compensation Management to reward the right behaviors with cash and non-cash rewards
• Available on-demand or for on-premise deployments