How to reduce Abandon Call Rate (ACR) in Call Center?

In a call center scenario, you find that there was a customer in queue waiting for assistance who suddenly left the call mid-way before contacting the agent. This is a case of abandoned calls.

In recent years, with rapid increase in call volumes , Call abandon /call drop has become biggest challenges in call center environment. Higher number of Call abandon indicates the inefficiency of the call center to handle calls volume and higher number of dissatisfied customers which is not a good sign for any business.

What is abandon call rate (ACR)?

Abandon call rate (ACR ) is described as a percentage of the inbound calls that are made to the call center but are dropped even before the customers can speak to the agent. It is ratio of incoming calls to the percentage of calls abandoned.

How to calculate?

Abandon call rate (ACR) is a key indicator to determine the call center efficiency. By analysing ACR , you can get detail insights of call center performance.
Abandon call rates have a relation to the waiting time of a customer. The longer the time a customer has to wait before they get connected to an agent, the higher is the chance for abandoning the call. This happens when customer gets tired of waiting for assistance from the call center agent and hence they hang up even before getting connected.

How to reduce the Abandon Call Rates

Whatever the reasons, every call abandon can be reduced by enabling various features of call center solution. Below are few ways which a call center can implement to decrease the number of abandoned calls and enhance the efficiency of the call center.

Offering self-service options:

First way to reduce call abandon is to offer self service options to customers by enabling IVR ( interactive voice response) feature of call center dialer.
Interactive voice response feature of the call center solution is an automated feature that reads out a pre-recorded messages to guide the customer through a menu as per caller’s input. It helps to identify the customer query before connecting to agents. By enabling easy and simple IVR helps the customers to get the solutions quickly on their own, which results in higher customer satisfaction and reduce the number of abandon calls.

Omnichannel Call Center Solution:

Implementing omnichannel call center solution helps to minimise the call queue overloads. The platform offers to handle interactions across multiple channels of communication such as phone, chat, email, text (SMS), and social media. Opting multichannel support saves time and provides a seamless customer experience. This feature must be considered when one is making improvement plans for their call center.

Offering a call back option :

Offering call backs option is also a good way of reducing the abandon call rates for a call center. With the help of the callback feature, one will allow their clients to ask for a call back if they do not want to wait in the queue. This will enhance the satisfaction of the customers and give the agents the chance to lose not a single client.

Announcing the waiting time to customers:

Another way to reduce the number of call abandon is to inform the estimated waiting time. If there is a provision to let the customers know about their waiting time in the queue, the clients will hang up less. The waiting time will help the customer to decide whether they should wait or opt for the Call-back option.
*astTECS call center solution has a feature to set estimated wait time announcement for inbound calls. The announcements are made automatically for callers once the estimated wait time is calculated by the system.

Automatic call distribution:

ACD features in call center features help to maximise the efficiency of the agent. It distributes the inbound calls and help customer to connect to an agent immediately. This helps the call center to manage the large volumes of incoming calls and not get overwhelmed by it. Additionally, The ACD features also have the option to set skill based routing which connects the customer to the most suitable agent rather than choosing the next available agent. This ensures customer satisfaction and minimize the call drop.

CRM integration:

CRM integration with Call Center Solution provides detail information about the customer which helps agents to give support efficiently in lesser time. Hence, the agent can dispose the call quickly and attend the next call. Increased speed and efficiency reduces the call drop ratio by shortening the call queue.

Call centre Report & analytics:

Call center report and analytics provides you the complete metrics of the call center like the performance of the agents, statistics on the inbound calls at different times of the day, and so on. You can easily analyze the report to understand call volume patterns ,when the abandoned calls are the highest or how much time the clients wait in the queue. These reports helps manager to staff call center agents at peak hours so that call queues can be reduced.

Conclusion:

Choosing the right technology and features of call center solution and using the resources efficiently, call center can reduce the number of call abandon significantly.
*astTECS Call Center Solution provides number of helpful features for the call centers which enables them to reduce their abandoned call rates, increase the productivity and efficiency of the agents considerably. To know more about *astTECS Call Center Solution Contact us for free consultation.