Senior Writer: Paras Kela
Reading Time: 8 MinutesPublished : September 30, 2023Are you tired of revenue losses and rising operational expenses at your call center? Consider digging into your call abandonment rates.
Also, 83% of customers want to communicate with support right after they contact a business. When their expectations are not fulfilled, they may abandon your call out of frustration and dissatisfaction, leading to customer churn.
To avoid that, you must calculate your abandonment rate, understand the importance of monitoring it, gauge its impact on your call center, and learn about its root cause. Our guide covers all these points in detail. Let’s get started!
What is Call Abandonment Rate?
Call abandonment rate is a key call center metric indicating the percentage of inbound calls customers hang up before connecting to a live customer service agent or achieving their calling purpose.
Today, fulfilling the calling purpose doesn’t always require customer-agent interaction, as some calls involve direct actions that can be achieved via contact center features or automated self-service. For instance, an Interactive Voice Response can tell you your account balance without the need to talk to an agent.
Lowering the call abandonment rate is pivotal for best call center management. You can do this by monitoring the rate, evaluating the probable cause, and implementing cutting-edge strategies. A call center software can help you perform these functions smartly and unify customer service across your contact center via its advanced features like AI automation, workforce management, and reports.
In modern contact centers, we consider a call as abandoned when the customer hangs up –
- Before speaking to a live agent
- Due to a technical glitch
- Without leaving a voicemail message
- When routed to an auto attendant or IVR menu
- Amidst the IVR menu before self-service task completion
- During the wait time of the call queue or transfer
- During live online interaction before connecting to a live agent or fulfilling the purpose
Why is Monitoring Call Abandonment Rate Important for Call Centers?
Monitoring call abandonment rate is critical for call centers because it’s a great measure of operational efficiency and customer satisfaction–key metrics for great call center management. Let’s understand the importance of monitoring your call abandonment rate in depth –
1. Identify Trends and Patterns
Tracking call abandonment rate regularly–daily, weekly, or monthly, helps you discover potential issues and areas of improvement for better call center management. You also get helpful insights–peak times of call abandonment or agents with higher-than-average abandon rates in call centers.
2. Ensure Timely and Relevant Action
Monitoring your call abandonment rate helps you evaluate your call center performance and make relevant improvements by comparing it with the industry standard or historical data. Based on this data, you can easily inform your decisions regarding staff modification for peak hours, agent training improvement, and strategy development for wait time reduction.
3. Measure Customer Satisfaction and Operational Efficiency
Your call abandonment percentage of your call center indicates the degree of customer satisfaction and whether they can fulfill their purpose of reaching out to your support team. This information helps you gauge and improve your customer service and wait times. Also, tracking helps you identify and eliminate inefficiencies in call center operations, like inappropriate call routing strategies.
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4. Spot Missed Business Opportunities
Monitoring abandoned calls in the call center simply mirrors the opportunities you missed. These can be regarding resolving an issue, customer inquiries left unaddressed, or leads that didn’t convert. You can then take relevant action and develop strategies to capitalize on all future opportunities.
5. Reduce Resource Wastage
Upon tracking your call abandonment rate, you can easily gauge the resources wasted and productivity lost due to abandoned calls in a call center. This helps you understand the degree of impact of abandoned calls on the cost-effectiveness of the call center. Based on this understanding, you can implement strategies to reduce the abandonment rate and consequently eliminate resource wastage.
You May Also Read : What is Call Monitoring? Importance, Benefits & Best Software
How to Calculate Call Abandonment Rate?
Call abandonment rate calculation quantifies a call center’s efficiency and customer service quality. That’s why we have explained the step-by-step process of calculation –
Step 1: Evaluate the Total Number of Calls Received
You can calculate the total number of inbound calls by adding all the calls received by the call center within the specified time frame. You may exclude the calls abandoned within 5 seconds or less. For instance, total calls received =100 and calls abandoned within 5 seconds = 25; this brings your total calls received to 75.
Step 2: Identify the Total Number of Abandoned Calls
To derive the total abandoned calls during the pre-decided time frame, subtract the total number of calls handled (suppose 70) from the total number of calls received (75, as mentioned above). This brings your abandoned calls to 75-70 = 5.
Step 3: Apply the Figures in the Formula
Once you have the figures–total inbound calls received and abandoned calls, it’s time to put them into the call abandonment rate formula to calculate the rate. Here’s the call abandonment rate formula –
Call Abandonment Rate =
(Total number of calls received (75) – Total number of calls handled (70)) /
(Total number of inbound calls received (75)) X 100
This gives us = 5/75 x 100
So, here, 0.06 X 100 = 6.7% is your abandon rate call center percentage.
Factors Affecting Call Abandonment Rate
Factors affecting your call abandonment rate are the points to consider for customer journey optimization, customer experience improvement, and call center operations improvement.
1. Wait Times
The gap between when a customer calls and when they connect with an agent is called wait time. Higher wait times test customers’ patience and lead to call abandonment, while short wait times lead to quick issue resolution and maximum customer satisfaction.
However, you must remember that wait times may be long for some and short for others. It varies with customer expectations and the nature of the call.
2. Agents Available at the Call Center
If your number of agents does not match your incoming call volume, you need to pay attention. Insufficient or poorly trained agents at your call center will lead to unaddressed calls, longer wait times and higher abandonment.
3. Call Routing Efficiency
Call routing refers to the process of connecting customer calls with the best available agents, relevant service levels, or the right departments. Poor inbound call routing makes customers wait for a long time or gets them transferred to different agents multiple times. This will cause frustration and ultimately call abandonment.
You May Also Read : Call Routing: How it Works, Benefits & Best Practices
4. Complexity of Self-Service Options
Self-service refers to resources or options that allow customers to find the required information without speaking to an agent–IVR, website information, or chatbots.
80% of customers readily communicate with a machine to eliminate long wait times. Now, if your IVR system has complex automated menus, it’ll confuse or frustrate customers, increasing the abandonment rate.
5. Connection Quality
The degree of efficiency of your VoIP connection decides your call abandonment rate. How? If your call center faces frequent connectivity issues–high jitter, poor call quality, and dropped calls, it will irritate customers, damage brand perception, and lead to abandoned calls.
6. Availability of Callback Options
Providing customers with callback options eliminates the need to wait on hold or call multiple times for the same issue. If your contact center lacks such options, customers might not want to wait and would find abandoning the call a wiser choice.
Impact of Call Abandonment Rate on Contact Centers
The call abandonment rate is a top metric to measure organizational performance, but it also significantly impacts other contact center operations. Here are a few of them –
1. Indicates Customer Satisfaction
Call abandonment and customer satisfaction go hand in hand. High call abandonment may be due to complicated auto self-service options or long wait times, which increases customer frustration and lowers customer satisfaction.
In contrast, if you lower the abandonment rate, customer satisfaction, brand experiences, and customer loyalty are bound to improve.
2. Highlights Quality of Business Processes
A spike in call abandonment rates indicates inefficiencies in your business processes, like high wait times and long queues, which strains the agents and irritates the waiting customer.
A deep analysis of your call abandonment rates will help you spot the areas that need attention, streamline processes, optimize agent numbers, and enhance call routing. Working on these critical areas lowers costs, boosts productivity, and improves operational efficiency.
3. Indicates Success of Altered Call Center Strategies
Call abandonment rate defines the accuracy of your call center management strategies and the effectiveness of your operational performance. So, analyzing this rate helps you gauge the success of changes made to your processes and make better decisions based on data.
If you find a low abandonment rate, you can be sure of the successful functioning of your contact center and positive KPIs like AHT (average handle time).
4. Monetary Implication
Each abandoned call is equal to a revenue-generating opportunity that you missed. But that’s not all; agents are assigned to receive a certain set of calls, and abandoned calls mean you will have to incur the agent cost without receiving any customer service results.
How to Improve Call Abandonment Rate?
Knowing that your call center has a high call abandonment rate is not enough; implementing strategies and the best call center software to lower it is equally important to ensure success at your call center.
In fact, global call centers experienced an average call abandonment rate (inbound calls) of 6.44%. If your rate is similar or more, you must follow the given hacks to improve it –
1. Increase Your Call Answer Speed
Improving answer speed refers to lowering the gap between a customer intending to connect with a live agent and having an agent on the line within 30 seconds. Lower this gap via call routing strategy optimization using Interactive Voice Response or Intelligent Virtual Agent.
IVRs ask a series of questions to gauge the caller’s intent and then forward the calls to relevant call groups, agents, or queues.
2. Efficiently Manage Agent Scheduling
Top-notch call centers can fail if they don’t match their agent availability with increasing call volume. You can match this by leveraging cloud-based scheduling tools that offer scheduling swaps, schedule suggestions based on forecasts, auto-paid time off approval, and more.
3. Lower Call Duration
Some support issues that call centers receive may take hours to resolve, regardless of call center automation and agent training. But high call durations lead to long wait times, exhaustion for agents, increased missed calls, long resolution process, unhappy customers, and ultimately, high call abandonment.
- You can tackle this by lowering agent talk time (ATT) and agent’s time spent on a call plus post-call work and hold time (Average handling time).
- Lowering Average Handling Time (AHT) and Average Talk Time (ATT) is possible by recording and analyzing calls via a CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) solution. On analysis, you’ll know which agents are taking too long and why.
4. Improve First Call Resolution Rate (FCR)
First call resolution refers to the act of resolving customer issues during the first contact, lowering the possibility of abandonment. To improve FCR, consider shifting to an omnichannel service that allows customer to contact you on their preferred channel.
Customers are calmer and give more issue-related information on their preferred channel, increasing quick first-call resolution. For agents, omnichannel service provides critical customer data to deliver personalized customer service, increasing FCR.
Wrapping Up
As a customer-centric business, you cannot afford to not lower your call abandonment rates. Why? Because high call abandonment negatively impacts your customer satisfaction levels, customer loyalty, and brand image. In contrast, lowering the abandonment rate is known to significantly improve the said metrics.
The best way to lower this rate is to gauge its impact, regularly monitor it, and understand the factors affecting it. Or even better, cut the hassle and adopt efficient call center software to smoothen your customer experience with advanced features and without manual labor. We can’t wait to see your business soar!
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, the call center abandon rate industry standard varies with sectors and call center types. For instance, the average rate for healthcare is 7.4%, hospitality is 5.81, and transportation is 6.91.
Some of the technologies that can help you monitor and reduce call abandonment rates are callback options, intelligent IVR, call routing, and self-service options.
Call abandonment rate in call centers and customer satisfaction are directly related. With long wait times and complex IVR menus, customers may get frustrated, unsatisfied, and ultimately abandon calls.
Yes, the average wait time is the span a customer spends waiting for assistance. In contrast, the call abandonment rate in the call center refers to the rate of calls customers hang up before connecting to an agent.
Paras Kela is an accomplished IT professional with 7+ years of industry experience, including 4+ years as a dedicated content writer. His expertise lies in crafting informative blogs on VoIP and cloud telephony, among other technical subjects. Outside his professional pursuits, he cherishes quality time with loved ones, indulges in watching documentaries, and finds solace in gardening.
Updated : May 15, 2024
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