Earlier this week, we posted about a new study from Ascent Group on first call resolution.  Today, Ginger Conlon at the 1to1 Blog had a great post on  the topic. She spoke with Rob McDougall, president of Upstream Networks, to get some tips on resolving customer questions efficiently.  We found these two points to be particularly interesting:

Information access. Companies should give agents easy access to the information they need to handle customers’ queries. “Easy,” meaning that agents should not only have that access, but also know how to get to the information they need. If it’s too much of a challenge, they’ll instead rely on what they know (or think they know).

IVR mazes. If a customer gets lost in a confusing or lengthy IVR, expect them to zero out to get to a human being.

How can companies address these issues? When it comes to dealing with telephone inquiries that come in from the Web, the answer is simple...cross-channel data passing. With cross-channel data passing, agents get a screen pop of the customer's activity as soon as a call is generated, so they don't have to waste time re-authenticating customers that were already logged in online.  Plus, the context of the online session can be used to bypass annoying IVR systems and route the call to the most appropriate agent instantly.