Enkata Rains Down Answers from the Cloud

Enkata, a provider of analytics-powered performance management software, this week unveiled its First-Call Resolution Metric Plug-In, the first in a planned series of cloud-computing services. The new plug-in provides access to the company's algorithm for first-call resolution (FCR), delivering services to a contact center's existing 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," says Ronald Hildebrandt, Enkata's founder and senior vice president of marketing. "Not only does [FCR] impact costs...but it has a very high correlation with customer satisfaction."

Hildebrandt says the new plug-in's "main value" is that it enables the management of FCR; but the cascading result, he says, is that companies will be able to 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," Hildebrandt says. "So it's a huge lever on the business.... Companies haven't had a good handle on measuring it, [so] it's really been an untapped opportunity."

Supporting Hildebrandt claim is a study by the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI). The ICMI report indicates that, despite nearly 80 percent of contact centers citing FCR as critical to their operations, nearly half of all centers don't even measure FCR, and only 20 percent of those that do use the metric do so on the agent level.

"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 availability of the new plug-in, Enkata only offered the FCR metric as an out-of-the-box element of its Enkata Manage solution. The new offering, delivered via the cloud, allows for faster implementation while leveraging existing dashboards and reporting, according to Hildebrandt. Participating contact centers on a regular basis upload to Enkata call-tracking data from key systems. The service then assesses the data and delivers back an agent-level FCR metric formatted to match existing reports. The FCR Metric Plug-In service also includes access to an Enkata Analytics Dashboard, which highlights FCR trends, ranks agents, and enables drill-downs into call detail when used in concert with Enkata's Sequence Replay offering.

"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 increasingly complicated metrics, assessing calls across many different parameters, including call-handling time, escalation, and transfers.

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