Abandonment rate of calls are measured by percentage of phone calls
made to a call center or service desk that are abandoned by customers before
getting connected to an agent of call center India. Abandonment rate of call
has a direct connection with that of waiting time. The longer the waiting time
or hold time, the higher the abandonment rate. Higher abandonment rate may
indicate under-allocation of resources to the call center or help desk by the
company, and can bring down the reputation of the company by offering poor
customer service. Such circumstances might lead to loss of sales opportunities
and highly dissatisfied customers.
Calculating
abandonment rate
Consider two call centers A and B. A can handle traffic of 100,000
calls per day while B only 20,000.
Contact
Center A
Of the 100,000 calls received, only 70,000 connect and are closed
properly. Of the remaining 30,000, around 5,000 are to be dropped due to
network issues and around 25,000 appear deliberately disconnected.
Contact
Center B
Of the 20,000 calls it can handle, only 500 are dropped on account of
legitimate network issues and another 500 is abandoned by the customer to
reasons best known to them.
Abandonment
Rate Comparison
Consider the chart below –
A gets almost 5 times the footfall as B but also drops more calls than
the latter.
The percentage of calls abandoned at A – 25000/10000 = 25%
That’s pretty high considering that the ideal abandonment rate is
anything around 8%-10%
B gets only 10,000 requests with over 500 abandonments
The percentage of abandonment is – 500/20000 = 2.5%, within the
allowed limit of 8%.
Technicalities
of call abandonment rate
Call abandonment metric can be utilized in both strategic and tactical
capacities. From strategic point of view, you should monitor this metric over
the long term to identify patterns in your call center that you can fix through
staffing or technical solutions. On the other hand, a tactical view helps in
figuring out problems as they occur to stop a few dropped calls from escalating
into a larger issue. Managers of call center services should assess caller
abandonment rates so as to better understand how high abandon call impacts
customer satisfaction in a call center.
Impact
on customer experience
According to research estimates, 60% of customers do not wish to wait
in the queue for more than a minute. The number of abandoned calls is growing
at 20% per year, and it is not just limited to voice calls. While shopping
online, customers abandon full shopping carts because of the tedious check-out
process. This not only impacts customer experience but also affects the ROI of
the company. Therefore, the management of the call center outsourcing must
analyze and measure rate of abandon calls and should seek a more holistic
approach of how to reduce abandon calls and enhance customer satisfaction in
the call center.
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