Hold the Phone! How to Reduce Call Abandonment

How to eliminate costly dropped calls for a thriving, efficient contact centre.

Caller abandonment is tremendously frustrating, both for your contact centre and for the customer who gives up the line after an impossibly long hold. As your business grows, rising call volume inevitably leads to a corresponding increase in call abandonment rates. These dropped calls can be costly and damaging for customer retention, but it’s not always easy to keep customers on the line. Here are six tips for reducing the rate of caller abandonment in your busy contact centre.

1. Look Out For Trends

Before you can go about improving your caller retention rate, you need to figure out what’s making your customers abandon their calls in the first place. Obtain your telephone software system’s call detail record so that you can see the hard data. This information will include details such as which line each call came in on, how long the call took to come through, and how long the customer waited in the queue before hanging up. See if you can spot patterns and gain insight about why customers are dropping calls when they do.

2. Increase Your Call Capacity

Simply put, the fewer customers who have to wait for an agent, the fewer dropped calls your centre will receive. Take steps to maximize your capacity for handling incoming calls. Increasing staff is the simplest and most effective way to do this, but is not always a financially feasible solution. Consider changing up your scheduling to account for your peak times. You might also work to reduce your agents’ average call handling time in order to field a larger number of calls each day. Finally, considering a third party contact centre support service to help scale your workforce effectively and ensure swift, smooth service at any time of day will help you field more calls and reduce call abandonment.

3. Inform the Customer

Providing the customer with honest information about the length of queue times and the likelihood of peak traffic can increase their trust and likelihood to stay on the line. Implementing a message that informs the customer of their expected wait time and place in the queue can alleviate caller frustration. You may also want to consider including a message that notifies the customers of your heaviest traffic hours to encourage them to make their next call at an off-peak time.

4. Personalize Your Welcome and Queue Messages

Some callers are so used to hearing bland, uninformative greetings (“Your call is important to us,” “Please stay on the line and an agent will be with you shortly”) that they may find them more irritating than helpful. Make sure your automated greeting messages reflect warmth and sincerity toward your customers. Including other service information in your messages may also encourage your callers to stay on the phone to listen. In fact, a study published by the North American Telecommunications Association (NATA) reports that callers who listen to useful information on hold may stay on the line three minutes longer than those confronted with silence.

5. Change Up Your Hold Music

NATA also reports that callers who hear music on the line stay on hold an average of 60 seconds longer than those who do not. But the type of music you choose for your call queue can further impact how long a customer is (or is not) willing to wait. While commonly employed light jazz or classical “elevator music” is hardly offensive, it does not do much for customer morale. Keeping your target customer demographic in mind, consider playing hold music that evokes a fun and light-hearted atmosphere. You may also want to implement an opt-out option for hold music, which can give customers who don’t like the music a sense of greater control over the call.

6. Implement a Call Back System

Allowing customers an option to request a call back from an agent allows them to be removed from the queue without affecting your call abandonment metrics. This option gives customers a welcome respite from the call waiting queue and can increase their satisfaction with your service.

Remember that some degree of trial and error may be necessary for fixing your caller abandonment issues. Try tracking your call detail data as you tweak these aspects of your service one at a time in order to analyze which are most effective and when. And if something starts working, don’t settle for good enough! It’s important to keep striving to reduce your call abandonment rate to zero, both for your contact centre’s performance and for your customers’ satisfaction.