What is issue resolution rate and what’s a good benchmark?

What is issue resolution rate?

Issue resolution rate measures the percentage of customer enquiries your contact teams have resolved. It shows how effectively your agents, chatbots or AI systems address and solve customer issues. A high issue resolution rate shows you’re doing well at this, leading to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.

How do you calculate your issue resolution rate?

To calculate the issue resolution rate, divide the total number of enquiries you resolved by the total number of customer inquiries, then multiply the result by 100. This simple formula means your team members can track and report on how efficiently customer issues are resolved, even without data analysis expertise. For instance, if a team resolves 85 out of 100 enquiries, the issue resolution rate would be 85%.

What is a good issue resolution rate benchmark?

A benchmark for a good issue resolution rate typically ranges between 70% to 90%. Achieving and maintaining a high issue resolution rate within this benchmark shows operational efficiency, superior customer service, and effective use of chatbots and AI technologies.

It’s helpful to measure First Contact Resolution (FCR) alongside this metric, to see how many of your enquiries are solved first time.

Rethinking issue resolution rate strategies to suit the age of AI

Without the help of AI, you might be relying on email surveys, phone calls, or long distance in-person meetings or video calls to try and work out why some issues are left unresolved. It’s important to work out where there are bottlenecks in your systems, so you can improve your issue resolution rate if it’s low, but all of these methods of gathering feedback and information are time consuming and that time could be spent working on higher value tasks.

Bring an AI assistant into the mix and it’s far easier to work out where any problems lie. You’ll be able to consistently gather data from chat based conversation to transform your insights and find out why some customer issues are not resolved:

• On our platform you can filter your data to inspect unresolved issues and view past conversations (with personal information automatically redacted) to see where the service fell down. You’ll not only see for yourself exactly how a conversation flowed; what was asked for and what the response was, you’ll have real data to go on, not just human memory.
• If an issue needs to be escalated, you can seamlessly transfer them to a human agent using live chat. The best part is, your manager can see the chat based conversation so far, so will already know what the problem is. Not only will the customer not have to repeat themselves, you can also be sure to escalate them to the right manager in the right department.
• Using API integration, you can link up your AI assistant with your go-to business system, so you can automatically log support tickets using a tool like Jira at any time of the day or night, ready for your teams to pick them up and start working on a resolution straight away.

Naturally, if your issue resolution rate is low, you’ll want to investigate overall service delivery. Using an AI assistant will help with this, since you’ll have one central store for all your customer data across all channels, meaning you have a constant finger on the pulse of customer communications, so can start to work through your issues and turn things around.

“Our AI assistant helps us capture vital intelligence to improve the services that really matter to our customers. For example, data demonstrating that parking is the most popular topic right now, helps us make the relevant changes and allocate resources more effectively.” ~ Andy Cooper, Customer Services Manager at Coventry City Council

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