Abandon Rate Call Center

To reduce call abandonment, call centers must improve their response time, deal with scheduling issues, take post-call notes, monitor call length, and improve first-call resolution. Your call center program should have access to all of these metrics.

Increase your response time:

The time between when someone expresses an interest in speaking with a live agent (by picking up the phone and dialing your number) and when they have someone on the line should be 30 seconds or less. However, studies have shown that some businesses take an average of a minute or more to react. Predictive behavioral routing, among other approaches, could be useful in combating this.

Organize Difficulties in Scheduling:

If a call center isn’t adequately staffed to meet demand, it’s all too easy for people to be forced to wait on hold for longer than they should. This is normally due to a failure to predict demand within a specific timeframe.

Take Notes After the Call:

This applies to all of the other responsibilities that an agent has in addition to answering calls. Anything they do “after the call” diverts their attention away from the phone lines, which can result in scheduling conflicts and resolution delays.

Keeping track of how long the call lasts:

It’s no secret that some problems are more difficult to resolve than others. However, failing to properly prepare for the number of complicated issues you receive will cause agents to spend longer periods of time on the phone, delaying the time it takes to address their issue and decreasing their overall satisfaction. If agents are on the phone for an extended period of time, this may result in longer wait times for new callers, as well as more abandoned calls.

Boost the first-call resolution rate:

It’s also worth noting that call abandonment rates are higher when a caller doesn’t get the resolution they want on the first call. To put it another way, if someone is calling about the same issue or question for the second, third, or even fourth time, they are much more likely to get irritated and hang up the phone. This may be due, among other things, to a lack of call center agent skills.

It’s also worth noting that just because you have a “low” call abandonment rate overall doesn’t mean you’re in the clear when it comes to customer satisfaction, which is maybe the most critical metric of all. As previously said, even though all five calls were legally “resolved” as soon as possible, someone isn’t going to be pleased if they have to call five times about the same thing. In this regard, far too many consumers make the mistake of setting the bar too low. You must be able to go beyond “customers are happy as long as they are not complaining.” That isn’t always the case, however.

Similarly, there are positive explanations for why calls could be dropped. Customers will find answers when waiting on hold if your company has set up a self-service or self-help portal, such as a Knowledge Base. They may have requested assistance via a variety of platforms, including web forums or chatbot vs live agent, and arrived at the same conclusion while on hold. In that scenario, the abandonment rate would still be high, but it wouldn’t necessarily suggest that anyone was dissatisfied with the interaction. However, far too many call centers lack the tools required to comprehend the situation’s context in this degree of detail.

Finally, keep in mind that none of these problems are most likely to blame for the high abandonment rate you’re currently experiencing. Long call wait times do not always tell the whole story. In fact, it’s likely that a combination of a few of them has led to the current state of affairs over time.

Fortunately, there are a variety of call center solutions available that can help you not only overcome high abandonment rates but also have additional teamwork and connectivity benefits in the future.