Customer Care Analytics · Brief 01
Billing-complaint spike · Los Angeles & Philadelphia
Volume rose — but resolution is the real story
The one line you configure
Where do complaint volume and resolution quality stand today, per 1,000 subscribers — and in which category × channel × city are the two moving apart?
In a nutshell
Both, and the second is the expensive one. Billing complaints across Los Angeles and Philadelphia rose 62% — but first-call resolution on billing collapsed from 71% to 34% over the same days. Volume up is a billing problem; resolution down means the front line cannot close them, so each contact returns. Repeat contacts are up 2.1×, which is why handling cost is rising faster than volume.
At a glance
WHAT MOVED · Complaint volume against first-call resolution
The lines diverge from day three. If this were only a billing defect, resolution would have held while volume rose.
WHERE IT IS · Complaint volume change by category × city
Billing is confined to two cities; New York's rise is network, and a different problem entirely — which a single national complaint total would have blended into one flat line.
WHY IT MOVED · What happens to a billing complaint, step by step
closed first time 34%
One missing line item accounts for the entire drop. No amount of staffing moves this number, which is why the volume read sends it to the wrong team.
What the connected view adds
A care dashboard shows volume and would route this to billing. Joined to the billing data, the driver is one charge type on one plan family — and the FCR collapse says the agents were never given the answer, which is a knowledge-base fix, not a billing one.
So what
Two fixes, two owners, and only one of them is billing. Billing owns the charge that generated the contacts; care operations owns the fact that agents could not resolve them — every other category's FCR is unchanged, so this is not staffing or training in general, it is a missing answer for one specific charge. Publish the resolution path first: that converts the repeat contacts back into single ones while billing works the root cause.
The points that matter
Resolution, not volume, is the finding
FCR on billing fell from 71% to 34% while every other category held — so this is not staffing or training in general.
34%FCR · billingEach contact returns
Repeat contacts within seven days up 2.1×, which is why handling cost is rising faster than complaint volume.
+2.1×repeat contactsIt is two cities, not the country
Billing complaints rose 68% and 56% in Los Angeles and Philadelphia against 4–6% elsewhere.
2cities affectedQuestions it already answers
Which charge is generating the contacts?
Joins complaint text categories to the billing lines on the same accounts, so the specific charge type is named rather than inferred.
What can this not tell us?
Not whether the charge is correct — that is a billing determination. It shows the volume, the resolution failure and the cost of leaving both in place.