What it means
In a contact centre the calculation is a simple ratio of abandoned contacts to offered contacts over a period. Most operations exclude very short abandons, typically calls dropped within the first five seconds, on the grounds that those are misdials rather than lost customers.
The number matters because abandonment is the point at which a service failure becomes lost money. A caller who hangs up after four minutes on hold has not been served, may not call back, and on a sales line represents revenue that simply walked away.
Abandon rate is driven mainly by waiting time, which in turn is driven by staffing against demand. Because call arrivals are lumpy, the fix is rarely more staff overall but better matching of rotas to the daily and weekly peaks, supported by call-back options that let people keep their place in the queue without holding.
Sensible targets vary by setting rather than being universal. Sales lines usually aim low, in the region of 2% to 5%, while very high volume or low margin services tolerate more, and any target should be judged against what an abandoned contact actually costs.
The same word is used for shopping baskets, where the rates are far higher and mean something different. A basket abandon rate above 60% is normal because browsing online costs the shopper nothing, so the useful comparison is against your own trend and against the specific checkout stage where people drop out.
In practice
Real-world examples.
Example
A utility's contact centre sees its abandon rate spike from 4% to 15% in the week after bills are issued. Rather than hiring, it moves three agents from back-office work onto the phones for those five days and brings the figure back to 5%.
Example
An online retailer measures a checkout abandon rate of 68% and breaks it down by stage. Nearly half the losses happen on the delivery cost screen, so it introduces free delivery on orders above $50 and the rate falls to 61%.
Example
A medical clinic finds that 11% of appointment calls are abandoned, almost all of them in the first ninety minutes of the day. Adding a call-back option and an online booking link cuts abandonment to 4% without changing headcount.
Formula
Calculation
Abandon rate = (Contacts abandoned / Contacts offered) x 100
A customer service line receives 24,000 calls in a month. Of those, 1,560 callers hang up before an agent answers.
Abandon rate = 1,560 / 24,000 = 0.065, or 6.5%.
To put a value on that, suppose this is a sales line where 20% of answered calls lead to an order with an average value of $240. The abandoned calls represent 1,560 x 20% = 312 lost orders, worth 312 x $240 = $74,880 of revenue in the month.
If the centre moves to a 3% target, abandoned calls would fall to 24,000 x 3% = 720, a reduction of 1,560 - 720 = 840 calls. Those recovered calls would produce 840 x 20% = 168 orders worth 168 x $240 = $40,320 a month, which the operations manager weighs against the cost of the extra staffing needed to get there.Case study
Seen in the real world.
Marrowfield Home Insurance is an invented, illustrative insurer used here to show how an abandon rate should be read. Its 60-seat sales centre reported an abandon rate of 9.2% against a 5% target, and the board's first instinct was to approve eight extra agents at a fully loaded cost of $45,000 each, or $360,000 a year.
Before spending anything, the operations director broke the 9.2% down by half-hour. Two-thirds of the abandoned calls fell into just seven half-hour windows a week, mostly Monday mornings and the two hours after each television advertisement aired. Overall staffing was adequate; the shape of it was not.
In this fictional case Marrowfield shifted rotas to cover those windows, added a call-back queue for waits over 90 seconds and asked marketing for the advertising schedule a week in advance. The abandon rate fell to 4.6% within a quarter, at a cost of roughly $45,000 in shift premiums rather than $360,000 in new salaries.
Watch out
Common mistakes.
- Reporting a single monthly abandon rate, which averages away the peaks where nearly all the abandonment actually happens.
- Counting every dropped call, including one-second misdials, which inflates the figure and hides the real service problem.
- Treating a low abandon rate as proof of good service, when it can simply mean callers are being held in a long queue rather than served.
Questions
People also ask.
What counts as a good abandon rate for a contact centre?
Many sales operations target 2% to 5%, but the right target depends on what a lost contact is worth compared with the cost of answering it.
Is abandon rate the same as bounce rate?
No, bounce rate measures visitors who leave a web page without interacting, while abandon rate measures people who started a process and gave up part way through.
Does offering a call-back reduce the abandon rate?
Usually yes, because the caller keeps their place without waiting on the line, though the call-back attempts should be tracked so that failed ones are not simply hidden.
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