Have you ever needed to make a call to a service provider, perhaps your phone or electric company, only to have the first contact be with an automated operator answering your call? Have you ever gotten lost in the choices of options they give you, or listened to the recording say repeatedly “your call is important to us, please stay on the line” only to give up on the call after extensive waiting?

When you contact a business, you do so with the intention of reaching someone who will assist you and resolve whatever issue you are experiencing. When there is no one available to speak with, due to agents assisting other callers, and you hang up to try again later, what gets registered is an “Abandoned Call”.

The Call Abandonment Rate is a metric which measures how many callers hang up or disconnect before they can be connected to one of our agents. The time on average to wait should be less than 30 seconds, from when the automated greeting is completed until an agent is connected.

What nobody wants to hear: “Your call is important to us, please stay on the line”.

At the Service Desk, we monitor the amount of abandoned calls to ensure that all callers are attended, which in turn provides us with two different perspectives.

Also read (in spanish): KPI’s and ITSM metrics to measure success

The first is using the Call Abandonment Rate to monitor over the long term, in an effort to identify patterns in the call activity, which then can be adjusted through staffing or technical solutions.

The second is the real time monitoring, which helps to limit the amount of exposure to missed calls as they occur to prevent the first few calls missed into escalating into a larger issue. An example of that is an outage or a stop in production when a large amount of users contact the Service Desk at the same time to report the problem. Real time monitoring of the abandoned calls can quickly alert a team that a bigger issue may be occurring and to address it quickly.

A high Call Abandonment Rate can also influence other metrics in a negative way, as each abandoned call reduces the First Call Resolution rates and, more importantly, could potentially leave the user with a bad overall experience.

• First Call Resolution helps us understand if the agent resolved the problem on the first call.

Ensuring that each user who contacts us is attended quickly, thoroughly and with the understanding that our goal is to provide a resolution of their issue being reported, provides the most care and empathy to ensure satisfaction.