How to control the abandoned in the call center

The 21st century is a digital century, with this digitalization, new entrepreneurs are onboarding daily. Especially last decade has been the decade of startups and unicorns.

With this boost in new enterprises, there is an increase in customers. And every entrepreneur understands that serving a high level of customer service is the only key to expanding and improving revenue growth.

How to control the abandoned in the call center

Most enterprises prefer to outsource their customer service segment to a call center due to its cost-effectiveness and to get rid of the hiring hassle.

In a call center thousands of call land every day. Though handling all the calls/chats can be a hard nut to crack but adequate roster planning and best practices can help a call center to handle the call volume as per the define threshold. 

Before looking in to the tips to control the abandoned rate, let's first understand "What is abandoned and how it is calculated?"

What is Abandoned?

Abandoned is a term to define those calls (out of the overall calls received) which could not be answered by the call center and dropped.

High call flow, increases AHT, inediquate staffing, no monitoring can be few of the reasons for not anwering the calls.

'Abandoned is calculated in percentage and known as abonded rate.'

The formula to calculate Abandoned %=

(Calls or Chats answered by the call center/ Total calls offered to a call center)*100

For example: If a call center received 1000 calls in a day and only able to answer 800 calls. Then abandoned rate can be calculated as below:

(Calls answered i.e 800/ Calls offered i.e 1000) *100 = 80%

To know more about call center abandoned rate you can click on the link 

How to control abandoned in the call center

A higher abandoned % is not a good indication of call center performance which can also lead to ramping down the business. However, there are proven ways by which you can control the abandoned call center.

In the article ahead, we share some proven tips to control the abandoned %.

Real-Time monitoring:

One of the most reasonable ways to contol the abandoned is stringent real-time monitoring of agents especially when the call volume is very high.

With the advancement of technology now there are various RTM (real-time monitoring) tools available that are helpful to gauge the real-time performance of agents. In addition to supervising real-time agents, one can also extract the report from the RTM tool to check hourly or bi-hourly abandoned and other metrics.

A call center needs to deploy just one RTM supervisor or analyst to keep an eye on the real-time call flow, busy, wrap AHT, and abandoned can easily be controlled.

Controlling AHT:

AHT is one of the common metrics in a call center.In controlling abandon rate as well the AHT plays a vital role. In the inbound process during peak hours (varies as per the process) only real-time management would not help rather you need to take care of your AHT piece first.

There can be new team members where only monitoring would not help rather you need a floor support or SME to help these agents to wrap up the call fast.

If you want to know more about how to control AHT you can click the link below:

Also Read: MIS in Call Center

Roster Planning:

One of the major reasons for high call abandonment is improper roster planning. If you want to keep your call abandoned rate under the threshold then you need to have adequate staff to handle the calls/chats in a day.

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The term roster planning does not mean calling the maximum number of staff to the office but rather planning the week's roster in a way that you can control the unplanned shrinkage which means distributing the correct amount of week offs, planned leaves (wherever required) and keeping in mind advance medical leaves in the buffer.

Identifying outliers:

In every call center, you will experience a few agents who are not willing to improve and holds a casual approach toward work ethics and management. If you are able to identify these outliers then you can reduce your effort to control abandoned by a good margin.

To identify and improve these outliers you can follow the below practices:

• To identify - check their historical performance trend and metrics.
• Post identification - tracking their daily performance.
• Refresher and coaching sessions.
• Work on improving their technical and computer skills.
• Conducting one o one sessions with outliers.

Introduction to Chat Bot/IVR:

Artificial Intelligence has played a pivotal role in every industry. In the call center industry as well, the introduction of Chatbots played a huge role in controlling the abandoned rate and increasing the customer satisfaction rate.

When there is a huge call flow we can use a chatbot to answer some of the FAQs (Frequently asked questions) of customers which will help to handle the initial call flow, if a customer still wants to be answered by a live customer support executive then chatbot can transfer the call/chat

Though in the call center one automatic machine we have been using is IVR (interactive voice response) which is quite helpful in assisting customers and helping them land the right lob for customer care.

I hope these proven ways will help your call center control the abandoned rate. Do share your views about the blog in the comment box.

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