Call Abandonment Metric

Overview

The Call Abandonment metric measures the number of callers that hang up or that are disconnected before they can be connected to one of your agents. This metric is closely tied to your Service Level KPI and Customer Satisfaction metrics. No one likes being stuck on hold, and your customers only have so much patience before they will hang up, or, worse, switch their brand loyalties.

The interesting part of the call abandonment metric is that it can be utilized in both a strategic and tactical capacity. From a strategic perspective, you should monitor this metric over the long term to identify patterns in your call center that you can fix through staffing or technical solutions. On the other hand, a tactical or real-time view of this metric is important in identifying problems as they occur to stop a few dropped calls from escalating into a larger issue.

Key Terms

• Active calls: The number of callers currently being handled by a live agent.
• On hold calls: The number of callers that have talked with a forwarding agent or automated system, and are waiting in the queue to talk to a live agent.
• Abandoned: The number callers who hang up before they can be connected with a live agent. Callers may either abandon prior to connecting with a forwarding agent or automated system, or abandon the call while waiting in the queue.

Success indicators

• Consistently meeting SLAs means a low call abandonment rate.
• A low abandonment rate while maintaining a high first call resolution rate.

Monitoring Call Center KPIs on a Dashboard

Once you have established benchmarks and targets for Call Abandonment, you’ll want to establish processes for monitoring this and other call center KPIs. Dashboards can be critical in this regard. Read more