The 8 Points Hiding Behind a Third-Party Booking

FCR was missing target on a travel and tourism account. FCR alone couldn't say why — combining it with CSAT and CES could.

Problem

First Contact Resolution was running below target. Looked at on its own, the metric could only confirm that something was wrong — it gave no indication of the mechanism behind it, or what to actually do about it.

Data

FCR, CSAT, and CES at the individual contact level.

Analysis

Instead of treating FCR as a standalone number, I cross-referenced it against CSAT and CES and grouped contacts by combinations of the three — isolating, for example, cases where CSAT was strongly positive but FCR was still marked unresolved. That divergence was the signal: FCR on its own would never have surfaced it, since it can only tell you the score is off target, not why.

Digging into that specific segment turned up a common thread: every one of those contacts involved a vacation booked through a third-party site. Agents had no visibility or edit access into those bookings, so the only option was to redirect the customer back to the third party — leaving the contact technically unresolved even when the customer was happy with the agent.

Solution

Brought the finding to the client with a specific, narrow ask: give agents visibility and edit access into third-party-booked vacations within the customer's account, closing the exact gap that was forcing a redirect instead of a resolution.

Result

Modeled an estimated 8-point FCR opportunity tied to this one process gap. By the time I moved to a different account, FCR here was up 5 points — a measured result, not just a projection, with the rest of the fix still rolling out.