Call Abandonment Rate
One of the most important and common call center metric is call abandonment rate. The most important goal for a call center is developing a connection with not only the existing clientele but with also the future ones. Call abandonment rate is when a customer hangs up before an agent can answer their concerns. If we want to make our CSAT scores higher, we have to reduce our call abandonment rates.
How we calculate Call Abandonment Rate
Before calculating the call abandonment rate, we remove all the calls dropped within the first five seconds as we term them as wrong calls. After removing those calls, we specify a category to examine and then we specify a time threshold (e.g a week or a month) and then apply the call abandonment formula to calculate the abandonment rate.
We apply the following formula to work out abandoned calls:
Abandoned Calls/ Total Calls x 100
Customer’s Emotional Analysis
Call abandonment is not as simple as it may seem. What’s more important than abandoned calls is understanding the needs of the customer. Customers in a specific industry want a detailed explanation of the issue or may have a long query and do not mind waiting to get their queries resolved. They are okay with expecting a call-back to get answers to their complaints. While some customers from a different industry prefer short and quick answers and long waiting times will impact them negatively.
Instead of only observing the abandonment rate, we analyze customer’s emotional needs and try to fulfill their expectations to provide a customer experience.
Strategic and Real-Time Review
In order to analyze call abandonment issues we have to review real time data which includes managing call queues, identify the number of calls being handled by an agent, number of transferred call and number of calls who hung up before being connected to our agents.
How we reduce Call Abandonment Rate
Our priority is to maintain SLAs (Service Level Agreements) with high FCR, high CSAT scores with low call abandonment rates. To achieve that, we follow these steps:
- We employ workforce management and avoid overstaffing or understaffing to avoid high call abandonment rates. We make sure there is enough staff available to adjust with peak hours and high influx of calls.
- We predict call patterns and schedule our ChatPandas to cater to our customers by forecasting for call peak hours.
- We offer customer a chance to leave a message for a call back and keep it in the queue until it reaches an agent.
- We optimize our messaging service and discard messages that increase abandonment and replace it with new messages.
- We increase our FCR as increased FCR translates to lower call abandonment rate.