As a manager, keeping commitments to customers may be more difficult. Slip-ups by suppliers, packagers, shippers, and field reps occur. Sales and marketing changes may not arrive on your desk in a timely fashion. Things break. The weather turns unpredictable. Flu epidemics happen. You find you can’t control everything.

However, you can measure first contact resolution. Once you know where you stand with customers, you can streamline processes and set customer expectations. Your measure of first contact resolution is a powerful communication tool to your peers in other departments. They are more likely to cooperate if you can show them that customers believe the organization is over-committing and underperforming.

And bring your customers into a feedback loop. The best centers repeatedly communicate with customers to optimize first-contact resolution. In one company, agents remind customers at the end of the conversation to call back at any time.

If you have increased your ability to meet your commitments to customers, please let me know how you did it.