How to reduce call abandonment rate in your call center?

Customers approach to call centers to resolve the issues they are facing. But unfortunately, that’s not what always happens. Sometimes their calls are listed as abandoned or disconnected. The problem occurs mainly when businesses do not choose right call center solutions and rely on limited features for cost savings. Let’s consider some ideas today that can help your team to improve the call abandonment rate for better customer services.

Average abandonment rates:

An abandoned call is the call that disconnects or terminated by the caller himself before the call was routed to the call center agent. Sometimes, inbound callers generally abandon the IVR or waiting for queue. But in today’s call center environment where customer expectations are raising continuously and they are looking for more personalized service, it has become important that you should also connect with the inbound customers as possible.

Short call abandons or the calls which are disconnected before the predetermined number of seconds must be carefully filtered out so as not to disturb your call center’s abandonment rate and impair the agent’s ability to make any negative decisions.

The process to measure call abandonment rate           

In order to measure the average abandonment rate, first of all, call centers need to configure the abandoned calls threshold to filter out the data. The most reliable practice is to exclude such calls that were abandoned in the first 5 seconds. We can use that threshold while collecting data for the report. After that, visiting the dashboard, you can even prefer to set some most appropriate date range, then divide the Abandoned Calls and multiply the number by 100.

High abandonment rates usually occur:

·        The call is too long and complicated

·        IVR messages are unclear and creating confusion for customers

·        Call routing is not setup properly and driving up the wait time for different segments of users/callers

·        Agents or staffing is inadequate and causing the callers to wait for a long and unacceptable amount of time.

Low abandonment ratios effects:

·        IVR is effective

·        Agents can answer the calls more effectively and quickly

·        Call routing is well optimized

·        The whole team would be properly staffed or even overstaffed

If you are suspecting that the IVR is an issue, you can consider to run a focus group and then observe all the users who are navigating through the IVR. It generally sounds like the overkill, but you should also think about your customer service as a product/service you are providing. Your whole team would run the usability sessions with the customers to effectively understand how to design your offering, so why shouldn’t you do the same thing with your customer service offering?

If you want to learn more about call abandonment rates or anything related to cloud-based call centers, you can visit VoIP Terminator for more professional advice and solutions.