What is a Resolution Rate?

Customer service can make or break a brand. Offering an innovative product is important but giving top-notch customer service is essential. A lot of metrics help to assess the success of a customer service team, and one of them is the Resolution Rate.

What is Customer Service Resolution Rate?

Resolution Rate is a simple customer service metric that indicates a particular number of tickets assigned to a customer service agent to the contact resolution in a stipulated time frame.

It is a metric that helps companies understand their customer service efficiency Organizations also use it to rank their agents by checking how quick they are solving customers’ problems and determining the overall efficacy of their customer service team.

To further simplify the entire concept, here is the resolution rate formula:

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• Resolution Rate = Solved Tickets/ Received Tickets x 100

Checking your Resolution Rate can also help you to check whether you are fulfilling your service level agreement (SLA)—a contract that promises resolution in a certain amount of time.

Different customer interactions will have different resolution expectations based on their preferred channel. For example, a customer who reaches out on a messenger chat will expect a quicker turnaround reply than someone who contacts you via email.

The Importance of Resolution Rate for Customer Service

Achieving a good Resolution Rate is essential as it will help companies retain customers and see repeat purchases. Don’t forget that the market is competitive and if you do not solve queries of your customers quickly or treat them right, they will move on to your competitor.

To avoid that, companies calculate Resolution Rate as it is one of the primary indicators of the effectiveness of the customer service team. If the resolution rate is not up to the mark, it gives you a direction to improving customer service efficiency.

Here are a few pointers elucidating the importance of resolution rate:

1. Helps to retain customers

According to Forbes, less than 4% of customers will stick around if your customer service is not up to the mark. When you’re measuring your resolution rates, you’ll strive to do better if they’re low. Constant improvement will result in exceptional customer service and your customers will want to stick around for longer.

2. Improves Company Image

Training your customer service agents to improve their Resolution Rate can give your company a chance to turn dissatisfied customers into satisfied ones—leading to a better company image.  Some unhappy customers can vent their frustration on social media by writing bad reviews that can hurt your brand image. So, if you practice maintaining a good Resolution Rate, you can turn potential brand detractors into brand promoters, provided you solve their requests effectively.

3. Reduced Cost of Customer Support

While startups could outsource to save the heavy expense of customer support an established brand can not. Your customers won’t need to contact you several times if you have a high resolution rate, which will shorten processing times and eventually lower customer support costs.

4. Maximizes Agent Productivity

If you stress the importance of Resolution Rate to your agents, they will learn to solve requests effectively with a quick turnaround time. It means they will have more time on hand for complex requests and will not have a heap of pending requests.

However, it is essential to note that Resolution Rate is not a standalone metric for measuring the quality of customer service agents. You should also check for metrics like Net Promoter Score.

What is a good Resolution Rate?

There is no-size-fits-all when it comes to a resolution rate. A good Resolution Rate can vary based on the industry and channel. Customers will have different expectations of how fast their query will be resolved based on the channel.

On average, it is expected to resolve a support request within 24 hours of the first contact through any channel. Although, customers might expect quicker turnaround times through phone calls, messenger chats and social media compared to emails.

The customers may expect a resolution of the first contact but that may not always be possible. You should keep in mind that at the end the customer experience matters most.

What can you learn from Resolution Rate Metrics?

Resolution Rate Metrics help you understand your customer service levels. It also lets you identify your customer service representatives that are performing poorly.

The resolution rate metric is related to team performance. This metric can help you to track each agent’s ability to resolve customer service requests.

After spotting the best agents, you can talk to them to understand their techniques to resolve or close a ticket. Later, you can train your low-performing agents with the help of those strategies.

Furthermore you can also track the monthly resolution rates of each agent to understand their performance annually. Having a yearly chart will also help you gauge the busiest times of the year. It will help you prepare your customer service team by hiring extra staff on a contract or part-time basis, during that time of the year.

Resolution rate metric will also help you check which low performing agents need training and the ones that need to be replaced.

Conclusion: You can learn the ways in which your customer service levels can be improved by regularly tracking your resolution rate.

How to improve your Resolution Rate?

Start by ensuring that you have enough agents to handle the issued tickets. Once this is in place, you can use a few strategies to improve the Resolution Rate.

1. Create a proper knowledge base

A knowledge base is a critical component for any agent to perform well. Provide your agents with access to a guide that can help them to answer common questions.

Create a knowledge base in the form of tutorials, videos and articles. Ask your agents to study those minutely during their training period. Once they are thorough, it will be easier for them to give suggestions or solutions to your customers.

Ideally, they can send the videos and tutorials to the customers directly, saving everyone’s time.

2. Minimize Customer Effort

Customers expect quick and easy service. They will be irritated if they have to jump through hoops to acquire sufficient support. Consider integrating a call center software or a helpdesk system that provides intelligent routing features.

Routing features will help to transfer calls/emails/messages easily and the customer’s wait time will decrease significantly. In turn, this will improve the resolution rate. If you do not have a solid routing system in place, it will take time to present with a solution internally—leading to a lower rate of resolution.

3. Be Clear on the Issue

Take all the necessary details from the customer on the issue. The more precise information you extract, the better solution you can offer. Listen to the customer patiently and make notes if you attend to them on a call.

4. Be Precise

When offering a solution to the customer, be extremely clear about the steps. Do not leave anything to interpretation, as you do not want them to reopen a ticket.

Also, avoid bringing up too much information as well. If it is not relevant to the issue, do not mention it, as it might overwhelm the customers, and they might need further assistance.

5. Analyze and Anticipate Customer Needs

The more you understand your customers, the better solutions you can offer. Try to understand why your customers are asking for support and ensure that your agent is prepared to meet their needs.

Try to anticipate issues that the customers might face before the support tickets are generated. This will improve customer satisfaction as the agent will be ready with a solution. You can do this by checking the customer feedback and noting the problems they face while using your product or service.

Creating a list of anticipated issues can help you look into common concerns and be ready with the solutions. So, as soon as a ticket is generated for such problems, your agent can almost resolve them immediately.

Parting Thoughts

93% of customers like repeat purchases from brands that offer good customer service. So, understanding, measuring and improving the Resolution Rate is crucial for you as a company.

Your customers do not have enough time to spare in this fast-paced world, so focusing on the turnaround time of your solutions is important. Of course, quality is essential, but customer service agents also need to focus on their speed.

Calculating Resolution Rates is a gold mine for any company as it can help you to understand the changes needed in the structure of your customer service team—and then deliver exceptional customer service.