Abandoned Calls

Abandoned calls are calls that were answered by the phone system (such as the ACD) but never reached a call center agent because the caller either hung up (usually due to a long wait), the caller was interrupted, or the caller realized he/she misdialed and arrived at the wrong number.

A high number of abandoned calls can be a sign of a number of call center issues such as:

• poor staffing (too few agents = higher number of abandoned calls)
• misconfigured call queues
  • are callers hearing the wrong message in queue?
  • is the queue not delivering calls to agents?
• a mismatch between the caller expectation and what the caller hears when the phone system answers the call (did the caller think they were calling a customer service line but heard an IVR recording about buying something?)

A large number of abandoned calls is typically bad — track this metric carefully.

Abandoned calls (or “abandons”) may be tracked over time periods. For example, to see how the abandoned call rate is trending, you may want to look at the count of abandoned calls (or the ratio of abandoned calls to answered calls) over a time period like a month, a week, a day, or an hour.

Abandoned calls require special attention when they are associated with a predictive dialer in an outbound campaign.

In a predictive dialer campaign, an abandoned call is a call made by the predictive dialer that is subsequently disconnected when the customer answers. An abandoned call often occurs when the call is connected but there is no agent available to handle the call. Abandoned call counts must be kept to a minimum in a predictive dialing campaign to avoid TCPA regulatory violations.