Call Center Management Featured Article
Call Center Metrics to Take Seriously -- Abandon Rates
One call center metric you probably want to be paying attention to is abandon rates. Abandon rate is the percentage of calls that hang up before an agent could take the call (and did not get a busy signal).
As officials of call center software vendor Monet Software say, this can mean a few things, but probably most likely is that it could be a measure of customer satisfaction -- “If customers hang up a lot, they might not like the speed of service.”
Company officials note that the longer it takes to answer a call, the higher are abandon rates. Okay, stands to reason. This is in distinction to people who might have called your call center by dialing a wrong number, they generally hang up when they notice it, by the first 10 seconds or so.
And high abandon rates can be a problem beyond just not looking good -- they can inflate future call volumes (2nd, 3rd try of same caller), resulting in even higher rates.
A couple months ago TMC (News - Alert) reported that according to officials of ProtoCall One, 27 percent of contact centers surveyed recently said their contact center is using Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure agent performance.
But on a more depressing note, the same study also found that 30 percent of the contact centers surveyed do not have a reliable method of measuring customer satisfaction. That’s right -- one in three contact centers don’t bother to measure their customer satisfaction.
Call volume metrics aren’t going anywhere -- nearly all (95 percent) of the respondents use such call volume metrics as call abandon rate, average speed of answer and average call length to measure agent performance, as if those somehow translate into more or less satisfied customers. Workforce metrics are still used widely, the survey found schedule adherence is used by 64 percent of respondents.
The dropoff comes with quality and customer-centric metrics. A not-horrible 59 percent measure agents on first call resolution, 41 percent using independent customer satisfaction research and only four percent -- that’s 4 percent -- “always” invite their customers to take part in an incentivised customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey after a call.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.
Edited by Chris DiMarco