Enkata Launches First-Call Resolution Cloud Computing Service

Enkata, a provider of analytics-powered performance management software, this week unveiled its First-Call Resolution (FCR) Metric Plug-in, the first in a series of cloud computing services the company plans to launch.

The new plug-in enables access to Enkata's FCR algorithm, delivering services to existing call centers' scorecards and dashboards via a cloud-based subscription and providing an accurate and actionable FCR metric at the agent level for all calls. 

“First-call resolution is a critical metric to manage your call center by and not only does it impact costs…but it has a very high correlation with customer satisfaction,” says Ronald Hildebrandt, Enkata’s founder and senior vice president of marketing. “The main value that this product will bring to the market is that every company now, whether you want to replace your agent scorecards or dashboards or not, will be able to manage the first-call resolution by using our product.”

According to Hildebrandt, the new plug-in will help companies reduce incoming call volumes, improve customer satisfaction, and boost agent engagement and retention.

“Customers that have used our FCR metric in the past have seen a 20 percent reduction in their repeat calls within six months and a corresponding increase in customer satisfaction, sales, and agent retention,” he says. “So it’s a huge lever on the business [and] because companies haven’t had a good handle on measuring it, it’s really been an untapped opportunity.”

Supporting his claim is a study by the International Customer Management Institute indicating that:

• nearly half of all contact centers don’t measure FCR;
• only 20 percent of contact centers that do measure FCR do so on the agent level; and
• nearly 80 percent of contact centers consider FCR critical to their operations.

“There’s this issue that [FCR is] either not being tracked or…it’s not being tracked at the agent level for every call,” Hildebrandt says.  “So it’s not actionable.”

Prior to the new plug-in, the FCR metric was only offered with Enkata Manage.  Providing a cloud-based subscription service, the new offering allows for faster implementation and results while leveraging existing dashboards and reporting, according to Hildebrandt.

Participating call centers provide Enkata with call tracking data from key systems on a regular basis.  The system then assesses the data and delivers an agent-level FCR metric back to existing reports in a standard format.

“By having this in the cloud, the advantage is we’re able to look across verticals, across companies and offer an algorithm that is more robust than it could be if it were singularly deployed for any particular customer,” Hildebrandt says. “We’ve monitored and optimized this across all our companies based on what we’re learning about the source systems and the trends.”

According to Hildebrandt, Enkata’s future cloud computing services will address other complicated metrics such as first-contact resolution and assessment of calls across many different parameters, including call handling time, escalation, and transfers.

The FCR Metric Plug-in service also includes a login to an Enkata Analytics Dashboard, which highlights FCR trends, ranks agents, and enables drilling down into call detail with the vendor’s Sequence Replay offering.