How many potential customers a business loses when a call center cannot answer all the calls? Regardless of the reason for the missed call, customers will be unsatisfied. And the possibility they come back is low. But you can still turn the situation around. By analyzing the number of missed calls and identifying the causes, you will see the weak points of your customer service and understand what to change in your work to increase profits.
What Is the Call Abandon Rate?
How many potential customers a business loses when a call center cannot answer all the calls? Regardless of the reason for the missed call, customers will be unsatisfied. And the possibility they come back is low. But you can still turn the situation around. By analyzing the number of missed calls and identifying the causes, you will see the weak points of your customer service and understand what to change in your work to increase profits.
Reasons for the increased abandoned rate could be various:
- The call center does not have enough employees to answer all the calls in time;
- A complicated IVR with too many options, which makes customers disconnect;
- Technical issues on the line;
- No Callback feature;
- Managers transfer calls to each other without actual help to customers, which makes them hang up;
- Agents are not clearly tasked with processing missing calls;
- Calls were received outside of working hours.
How Much Missed Calls Cost for Business?
Even when you have a lot of site visits and good-quality advertisement that attracts leads, if the percentage of abandoned calls of the call center is high, your business loses customers. The acceptable abandon rate is 5-10%. The higher this rate, the worse call center effectiveness is.
Small and medium-sized businesses are particularly sensitive to missed calls, as it will lead not only to worsened image but profit margin overall. You can calculate the company's loss due to high abandonment rate by using the formula:
Average purchase amount per call X Number of missed calls = Lost revenue
Missed calls have other long-term side effects as well:
- Customers share bad customer experience stories and the company's reputation takes a hit;
- Value of your product decreases;
- Employees’ motivation is negatively affected.
But where's lost opportunities, there are the answers to increasing revenue of a business, thanks to improving customer service.
How To Get More Customers by Decreasing Call Abandon Rate?
If you already use virtual numbers from Freezvon, you're getting detailed Call Statistics in your account:
- How many calls were received or missed by the call center;
- How long each conversation between an agent and a client lasted;
- Which agent receives more forwarded calls;
- Calls total daily.
This data will help you to paint the full picture of call center effectiveness.
The most obvious way to lower the call abandon rate is to hire additional personnel. But even if you hire more agents, it does not guarantee the quality of service. You can start lowering the number of missed calls by changing your IP telephony settings.
Inform About Wait Time
It's a peculiarity of human perception that wait time will seem longer if we don't know for how long we have to wait. You can add an audio message to the IVR script for the call center to inform when, approximately, an agent will respond. Of course, there will be customers that refuse to wait in a queue. But a lot of users will be mentally prepared and will be more loyal waiting for a response.
Redistribute Workload on the Telephone Line
With sequential call forwarding, if the first agent is already in a call with a customer, then the new call will be forwarded to the next one. This will increase wait time. You can use simultaneous call forwarding instead (when a call is forwarded to all agents at the same time) or by a condition (to free agents only; to the idlest agent etc.). These forwarding settings could be configured at virtual PBX. New customer calls will be distributed between managers more evenly.
Create a Virtual Queue by Using Callback
As not to lose customers during peak hours at the call center, use the Callback service. IVR is able to not only offer callers options for call redirect but activate a Callback option. Then, the customer's information enters the system and is added to a virtual queue. As agents process the current calls, they can call the customer back. Having a Callback widget increases customer satisfaction. Thanks to it, the number of customers who didn't make the order, decreases. And the organization cuts costs because there's less money needed than during incoming calls received at a toll-free line.
Activate voicemail outside of business hours
Every so often, customers contact the company on days off. The number of missed calls grows, especially if the working hours of the company are not specified on the main website page. Why miss calls, if you can provide the buyer the option of leaving a message. Customers specify why they're contacting the call center, in a voicemail message. And agents can remind them about their requests when they call them back. Because sometimes, people forget why did they attempt to contact that specific organization.
Conduct Additional Training for Call Center Agents
Your IP telephony gives you not only call statistics, but tools to control the work of managers: call recordings. It's important to focus on average response time as well as average call duration. Regular instructions and training for managers not only improve their confidence, but also lead to a decrease in missed calls. Agents are able to quicker react to calls and help the customers.
Create a FAQ Section on the Website
Have you noticed that customers come to you with typical questions? That means they can't get this information from your website. Adding the FAQ section allows lowering the contact center workload because customers can quickly find the answers about the goods and services. This way, they won't have to wait on the line for long, which in turn will reduce the number of customers who leave without making the order. And if they want to get a consultation, they can contact the agent via a Click to Call widget (an interactive button that allows initiating a call from the website page). Freezvon provides it for virtual numbers for free.
Reschedule Working Hours
Call centers have peak hours during which agents experience an increased workload and the efforts they put in their customer interaction lower. At times like this, you need to manage the workflow by adding more managers. It is easier to do with remote assistants that work from home with flexible hours. Virtual PBX allows managing remote and office workers in the same system.
Abandoned calls are a natural process for a call center. But the fewer customers go without a response, the higher your profit. Virtual telephony provides many services to optimize work and lower the call abandon rate. Consider the time the agent spends on the callbacks within the total work hours. Because manual processing of abandoned calls is the direct way to new sales.
