What is first call resolution?

First call resolution is one of the few contact-centre measures pointing at the caller's experience rather than at the operator's convenience.

Measuring it honestly is harder than quoting it. You need to know whether the same person called back about the same thing, which needs matching calls rather than counting them.

For a small business the useful version is simpler: how many callers got their appointment booked or their question answered without you ringing anyone back.

Say a small property management office handled calls from 80 different people last week. To get a first call resolution figure, export the log, sort by caller number, and flag anyone who called more than once within three days. Eleven numbers come up.

Now read those eleven. Four called back about something new, so they don't count against you. Seven called back about the same issue: a repair nobody scheduled, a question that got half an answer. That leaves 73 of 80 people handled the first time, or 91 percent.

Then be honest about the holes. Six calls that week came from blocked numbers and can't be matched to anything. A tenant who called from her cell and then from her office line counts as two satisfied callers. And someone who gave up and emailed instead shows as resolved. So the true figure is somewhere under 91, and what you can trust is the list of seven.

Vendors of automated phone systems often quote a containment rate, and it's easy to hear it as the same thing. It isn't. Containment counts calls that ended without reaching a human. Resolution counts callers who got what they needed.

Picture a caller stuck in a loop who gives up and hangs up. That call is fully contained, and it resolved nothing. The reverse happens too: a call transferred to your office manager and fixed in ninety seconds was resolved but not contained. Optimizing for containment alone pushes a system toward making people harder to reach, which is the opposite of what a small business wants from its phone.

When you see a percentage on a vendor's page, ask which of the two it is, who decided a call was "resolved", and whether callers who phoned back were subtracted. For your own line, the repeat-caller list is a better guide than either number, because every entry on it is a specific person you can call and a specific gap you can fix.

GreetKeeper publishes no resolution figure, and we would be inventing one if we did. A rate nobody measured on real calls has no place on this page.

What you can measure is your own: count the callbacks you had to make this week, and compare it with the week before you switched anything on.

Transcripts make that countable rather than anecdotal, since you can see which calls ended with a booking and which ended with a promise.