Guest Blog: The Daly Interview with Cinda Daly and Pete McGarahan
We brought back the Daly Interviews in May to share the insights of industry experts, fellow members, and HDI friends. In case you missed our first one, check out Pete McGarahan’s interview where he talks about the “shift-left strategy.” What’s on your list to shift left?
Sneak Peek:
Cinda Daly: First contact resolution (FCR) has been a key focus at the service desk for years, but
you frame that metric in a new light with this shift-left strategy. Just what is shift-left?
Pete McGarahan: The shift-left strategy focuses on moving issue resolution to the lowest cost level
in the service and support organization, with a focus on resolution at the front line or at the closest
point to the customer (level 1 and level 0). When the customer calls your service desk, you must
be sure that the front line staff is empowered, tooled, and knowledgeable enough to resolve that
customer’s issue to their satisfaction within a reasonable amount of time, seven to eight minutes, on
that first phone call.
Daly: Are support organizations struggling to improve FCR percentages, or is this an emerging new
area of focus to create a leaner organization?
McGarahan: A little bit of both, actually! First call resolution is important, primarily, because it
is linked to increasing customer satisfaction and, secondarily, because it lowers the total cost of
support by avoiding a costly and time-consuming escalation. Given the state of economy, service
leaders are tasked with overhauling their support model and extracting repetitive support costs.
They need to simply continue doing what they are doing now, but better and less expensively. At
the same time, they need to eliminate recurring issues and deflect low value, high volume requests
to self-service. The overall value proposition is to increase customer satisfaction, lower costs, and
free-up expensive technical and business resources to work on critical projects.
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