First contact resolution and repeat contact calculator
Every contact that was not resolved first time comes back as another contact, so part of your volume is your own failure demand. Enter the contacts you handle and your first contact resolution rate, and the calculator separates underlying issues from repeats, prices the repeats in agent-hours, and shows what a few points of FCR would free.
Failure demand you are staffing for.
- Repeat contacts per day
- 692
- Agents a day working on repeats
- 12.9
- Underlying issues per day
- 2,308
- Contacts saved at +5 pp FCR
- 138
- Agents freed
- 2.6
Show the working
- Contacts = issues × (1 + (1 − FCR) × repeats per failure), so issues = 3000 ÷ (1 + 0.25 × 1.2) = 2308 a day, and 692 contacts are repeats (23.1% of volume).
- Repeats cost 692 × 300 s = 57.7 handling hours a day; an agent delivers 4.46 a day, so 12.9 agents a day work on failure demand.
- Raising FCR to 80% leaves 2862 contacts a day: 138 fewer, 2.6 agents freed.
Doing this for every interval of the week? Pebble WFM computes the requirement from your forecast and builds the roster. Free month, no card needed.
How repeat contacts are calculated from FCR
If a share of issues is not resolved first time and each of those generates on average some further contacts, the contacts you handle are the underlying issues multiplied by one plus the failure share times the repeats per failure. Solve that backwards and the volume splits into issues and repeats.
Repeats are staffed like any other contact, so their handle time converted through occupancy and shrinkage is the agents a day spent on failure demand. That number is usually larger than the FCR percentage suggests, because a 25 per cent failure rate with 1.2 repeats each is 23 per cent of all volume.
An FCR improvement removes repeats without touching issues. Five points of FCR at these figures is a few per cent of volume, which through the same chain is a few agents. It is also the only volume reduction that makes customers happier.
Frequently asked questions
- How is FCR measured?
- Best from the customer's side: no further contact about the same issue within a window, usually seven days, across all channels. Agent-declared resolution runs ten to twenty points higher than that and should not be used for this calculation.
- What is a good FCR?
- Seventy to seventy-five per cent is typical for voice; above eighty is good. Simple transactional lines run higher, complex support lower. The trend matters more than the level.
- Why more than one repeat per failure?
- Some customers try twice, or try chat and then phone. Measure it as repeat contacts divided by unresolved issues from your contact history; 1.1 to 1.4 is common.
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