What is Call Abandonment Rate?
One of the main challenges of directors in companies, manufacturers, businesses, and services is decreasing the number of abandoned calls(Call Abandonment Rate) in their call centers, help desks, and sales and marketing departments.
And as you know, call abandonment rate value is the number of all the abandoned calls divided by all the calls received in a company, organization, department, or even a branch.
Managing to take down the call abandonment rate is vital, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the only factor which could have an impact on your company. There are also some other important Key Performance Indicators (KPI), which we also have to put into consideration as well.
Notice that, in fact, it’s not worth it to lower the call abandonment rate less than a certain value, or take the risk of allowing it to go too high.
Yes, it’s pretty obvious that low call abandonment rate leads to keeping your customers more satisfied and never miss the calls of your most beneficial clients and so on, but you should really know how far you need to go to manage it.
Most of the managers think that in order to reach higher levels of customer satisfaction, they necessarily have to pursue all types of strategies and make some great efforts to lessen the abandonment rate. However, the image below—which comes to us from MetricNet LLC—shows us how our attempts could eventually pay off in return.
As it’s depicted on the image, the curve shows a constant and fixed value for the rates in between 0 to 8 percent. This means that virtually any attempt to boost up customer satisfaction within this range won’t have any noticeable outcome.
Some of the managers may think of hiring more agents in their help centers or increase up their landlines/Trunk capacities to tend the abandonment rate to zero. But like I said, it’s not worth it.
As an example, I’d like you to imagine that you have a call center with 10 employees answering your company phone calls. If we assume your abandonment rate as 8, then practically it requires you to add 2 to 3 more agents to decrease the rate to 4 percent.
Pay attention that in order to lower the value to 4 percent, your costs increase up to 30 percent.
The curve above also shows us that as soon as the abandonment rate goes beyond 8 percent, customer satisfaction starts to fall down very dramatically. And as the rate goes higher and higher, customer satisfaction will head to zero so quickly.
This suggests that even a few percents could have a great negative impact on your company or organization customer satisfaction level. Therefore, with all of this being said, as a manager, you must keep your eyes on 8-percent value and never allow the rate to exceed higher than this limit.
To better understand to what extent and level you must keep the abandonment rate value, professional managers have come up with a safe range known as Optimal Rage. By considering all the discussed matters above, it’s advised to keep the rate within this range.
Optimal call abandonment range starts from 4 percent to 8 percent values. It is believed that as long as the call centers, help desks keep themselves within this range, they’ll get an acceptable high customer satisfaction level with the most optimal costs.
As this value is considered one of the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) which has a great role in achieving higher levels of customer satisfaction, most of the claimed full-featured Call Management and Analysis software like PBXDom offer some great tools which enable us to measure and keep track of this metric.
Fortunately, PBXDom has a wealth of widgets and reports which do the job for you, like Abandoned Calls Percent widget which could simply present you with the latest abandonment rate in your company or even at smaller scales, your department.
However, there are still a lot of other great tools on PBXDom which you can find, explore and benefit from. In order to learn about them, you can refer to the Widgets section of the PBXDom’s help pages by clicking here.
Now that we know about call abandonment rate impact on customer satisfaction level and could have the right tools to measure the value, the question becomes: ‘What strategies could we pursue to keep the abandonment rate in a company or organization within the optimal range?’
The answer to this question will be discussed in my next upcoming articles about abandonment rate.
If you have any questions, feedback, and suggestions, please feel free to contact us via our email, online chat or toll-free phone number. We are absolutely looking forward to hearing from you.
