what is abandon rate and how doesit affect the business?

Hello Vinamra,

Interesting question.
Abandon rate, basically, is the number/percentage of calls abandon before being transferred to an agent/advisor.
This can have a huge impact on your business. In the outsourcing world it is possible to have service level agreements with your clients that stipulate that a specific abandon rate must be maintained. Should you not adhere to this rate there may be financial penalties reducing the revenue generated by your business. This could also have a detrimental effect on your client relationship.

At the same time, the customer perception of the quality of your service could deteriorate by having high abandon rates. This may be due to having insufficient agents available to take the calls, which could be fixed by recruiting or re-scheduling your shift patterns.

Similarly if all your calls are being abandon in 5 seconds, you need to ask yourself whether it is worthwhile trying to fix a problem that doesn't actually exist. From my experience in South Africa, during school holidays we get a lot of these abandon calls from school kids playing pranks. This usually dies down when school terms resume.

I hope this helps clarify things for you. Feel free to mail me should you want further information.

Regards
Christopher Mills
chris.mills@paladin-consulting.co.za

Hi,
I really appreciate your very brief and precise information regarding the effect of abandon rate on business .It really helps me to clear a lot of doubts and also undersatnd the importance of it in our environment.
Would also really appreciate certain good practices followed to keep abandon rates comfortable and profitable for business.

Hello Vinamra,

Well, there are various things to look at when considering abandon rates. For instance:
- Your call routing strategy, if not properly setup, can increase the amount of abandon calls. This is more relevant to an inbound environment. ie. If your skill groups are setup to cater for a specific line that you assume is your prioirty, yet you forget to cater for other incoming calls/skills, you can increase your abandon rate. Depending how your costing/SLA is structured, this could lead to financial loss or penalties being charged.

- Simlarly on an outbound environment if you are using a predictive dialler, not having the dialler properly configured can result in "live" calls being listed as "no shows", and therefore not being transferred to the agents. The extent of the delay between your site and the country your are contacting can also have a major impact on the calls being hung up by the caller due to no response.

There are numerous variations that could decrease or increase the abandon rate, and thereby having a financial implication if your revenue recovery is based on calls responded to, or sales made.

I hope this helps. Please feel free to provide more clarification on your current setup if you are looking for more detail.

Regards
Christopher Mills
chris.mills@paladin-consulting.co.za

Hi Chris,
Thanks a ton for your quick response and all the help
regards
vinamra