Contact centres are increasingly handling more interactions than ever before. Long hold times and diminishing service levels are now becoming the norm. That’s why one of the most critical components and metrics that can weaken your call centre performance is experiencing short abandoned calls. 

So, What Exactly Is A Short Abandoned Call?
Short abandoned calls shouldn’t be confused with abandoned calls.

Yes, there is a big difference.

Short abandoned calls are those calls that enter your system but are disconnected from the customer before connecting to a live call agent and after a set number of seconds have elapsed. This set number of seconds is a value that is set in your settings. Normally these calls are under 10 seconds so unless you have Auto-Answer option very often it’s not humanly possible to answer them.

Abandoned calls, on the other hand, are those calls that enter your system, join a caller’s queue and stay beyond a set duration but unfortunately, the caller hangs up while still in the queue.

How Short Abandoned Calls Affect Reporting
Normally Call Queue reports group all call abandonment metrics; short abandoned and abandoned calls together. The end result is that their service reports will contain data insights which are inaccurate and if used, will not produce desired results.

But this is not the case with Nectar Desk – we do not include Short Abandoned Calls into Abandoned Calls reports and show them separately under Call History.

Ways to Avoid Short Abandoned Call Metrics from affecting Reports

As we have seen earlier, the inclusion of short abandoned calls into the call centre reporting system will produce wrong data insights. Below, are the different ways you can implement to avoid your short abandoned call data from interfering with your call centre service reports.

• • Exclude short abandoned call data, from the process calculating your call centre abandonment call rate. This is because it is assumed that these calls were made by individuals who had mistakenly dialled a wrong number or perhaps had dialled the correct number but thought they might have dialled a digit incorrectly and hung up to redial the same number once again. 
  • Settle for a standard ‘short call’ cut-off time by looking at your callers log reflecting the duration of calls between specific intervals such as; 0-5 seconds, 5-10 seconds, etc. This information will assist you in differentiating between mistaken calls and calls with true intent.
  • Have a reasonable threshold for categorizing calls as ‘short abandoned calls’. You would use the globally, accepted call duration that stipulates what a short abandoned call should be. 

• Regularly Check Your IVR System. Your Interactive Voice Response system would be faulty, resulting in caller drop-offs after only a few seconds – considered as short abandoned calls. Come up with a regular maintenance schedule that checks your IVR system for any faulty phone lines or processes that aren’t working incorrectly.

Wrapping Up

As we discussed earlier, short abandoned calls should be categorized and differentiated from the normal abandoned calls to your call centre. Failure to do adhere to that will result in having service reports with inaccurate data which will be of no use to your call centre operations.

We at Nectar desk offer call centre solutions that group short abandoned calls separately from the rest of the abandoned calls, so as to enable your call centre make better, more informed decisions.