How to Improve First Call Resolution with Microsoft Office 365 Service Tickets

Throughout the holiday season, it’s likely you’ve been a customer of service desk operations at some point. From the customer perspective it can be quite painful to experience the long, drawn-out calls or chats, especially if they take more than one communication and a lot of back and forth to resolve. When companies can’t resolve an issue on the first contact it can harm an organization’s reputation, and waste time and money.

IT service providers offering Office 365-related managed services and support to end users will benefit by improving the rate of cases that are completely handled and closed on first contact, otherwise known as “first call resolution” or FCR.

According to SQM Group, there are several benefits of increasing FCR, including:

• Reducing operating costs
• Improving customer satisfaction through speedy resolution
• Improving employee satisfaction and reducing turnover
• Increasing opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell to satisfied customers
• Reducing customers at risk, thereby protecting recurring revenue and lowering cost of customer acquisition

Clearly, increasing FCR is positive, but what are some of the reasons it’s challenging?

Here are a few reasons that Paul Robichaux, Microsoft MVP, pointed out in his recent webinar, “How to Increase First Call Resolution.”

1. Problems come in different “buckets.”

Every Office 365 problem falls into one of three buckets; customer/user, network or Microsoft. It can be difficult to identify which bucket the problem falls into, but doing so informs you whom to get help from. You can’t resolve a problem until you know which bucket it falls under and who has the power to fix it. Unfortunately for service desk operators, Microsoft isn’t to blame nearly as often as we think.

2. Users aren’t always reliable narrators.

Many times, users don’t have the technical knowledge or vocabulary to clearly and accurately articulate what the actual problem is. You need to know what questions to ask to correctly identify the problem and the “bucket” it belongs to.

3. No one has complete visibility.

Microsoft doesn’t know what you can see within your network and you can’t see the inner workings of Microsoft’s data centers. There will always be an element of mystery once the data passes Microsoft’s threshold.

4. Actions have consequences and take time.

Your service desk is only as good as your weakest technician–whether that be your most junior technician, the technician with the least amount of knowledge on the issue, or the technician with little patience or emotional intelligence. Prioritizing issues is difficult, and it takes skill and care to know which issues to prioritize and which issues are out of your hands for someone else to pursue and solve.

So, what will help you increase FCR?

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