Call Abandonment Rate

What is the Call Abandonment Rate?

The Call Abandonment Rate is the percentage of customer calls from the total abandoned by customers before a support agent is reached.

This KPI is a measure of customer dissatisfaction, and a reflection of the efficiency of your support team.

While the Call Abandonment Rate might appear a negative KPI to keep track of, it fulfills an important function. Being able to spot issues with customer service when they arise will ensure your support team can more easily course-correct if needed.

Call Abandonment Rate is an important metric for your customer support team to monitor.

Why is the Call Abandonment Rate important?

The Call Abandonment Rate is important because it measures customer frustration with your call support system. Customers will abandon calls for various reasons – the wait is too long, realizing the support team actually won’t be of help, or that the IVR menu was too complex.

On the other hand, a customer may have found the solution to the problem at hand, or was disconnected from the call unintentionally.

Your Call Abandonment Rate thus allows you to track how often issues with your phone support system, so you know how to address these problems when they arise.

How to calculate Call Abandonment Rate

To find the Call Abandonment Rate, divide the number of abandoned calls in a period by the total number of calls in the same period. Multiply the result by 100 to express it as a percentage.

If necessary, find the number of calls abandoned by the following formula, and plug the result back into the formula above:

How to decrease Call Abandonment Rate

While benchmarks will vary between industries, a Call Abandonment Rate is considered high if it consists of at least 10 percent of calls.

The best way to decrease the Call Abandonment Rate is by allocating appropriate resources to your customer support team. This can take the form of adding more personnel, providing more and better training to your current staff, or both.

Other, practical ways to reduce call abandonment include improving your agents’ scheduling, offering callbacks to customers, and investing in automated responses for simpler customer queries, which will help reduce your agents’ workload.

Customer Abandonment Rate will likely fluctuate in tandem with related KPIs at different times of the year, so seasonal customer demand is another factor you’ll have to keep in mind when analyzing this KPI.

Other KPIs similar to Call Abandonment Rate include:

• Average Reply Time
• Average Resolution Time (ART)
• First Response Time