Removing <10 Second Abandons at Skill Level

Answers

• E Jacobs Posted at 7:56AM on Apr 24, 2012

  I think it depends on your overall call volume and the nature of the business (call types). If you receive 450 calls a day and you discount the calls that abandon within 10 sec or less it stabilize your abandonment rate. If you receive 5,000 calls a day and you discount calls that abandon 10 sec or less it is less likely to impact your business as much. 10 sec is two rings, depending on your business model and your callers expectations will drive if you should discount those calls or not.

• Jasmindar Singh Posted at 10:44AM on May 11, 2012

  It is difficult to manage customer behaviour. My center manages about 8,000 calls per day and all call abandoned within 5 seconds are discounted.

• Jeff Palzkill Posted at 8:11AM on May 14, 2012

  Either way works - if you discount abandon calls at any level be sure to change your abandon percentage metric downwards. For example if you count all abandon calls perhaps a 5% abandon rate is right for you, but if you are discounting "quick abandons" then you'll probably need to move the abandon rate metric down to 3-4% range. And in some call centers where service level is calculated as Acceptable/Handled (which discounts all abandons) you'll probably want to have the abandon rate KPI down in the 1-2% range and do some deep dive analysis on why and when customers are leaving the queue. Note: understand that Acceptable/Handled artifically inflates service level and I've actually seen it at one of the companies in my past. Jeff Palzkill, MSTM, CCOM

• Siraj Hassan Posted at 8:18AM on May 17, 2012

  The short call abandons depends on the service level targets if the service level target is 80/20, then we need to discount all the calls abandon with in 20 secs. The staffing at any centre will be manage the service level targets and the same would be scheudled at each half hour to manage a service level of 80% in 20 secs. If the call is abandoned with in 20secs, then the contact center staff cannot be blamed for because, the staffing was avaialable to manage the service in 20 secs. Regards, Siraj

• Scott Henkel Posted at 8:18AM on May 17, 2012

  First off, you have to understand how your ACD collects and stores data. Ms. Wierbicki stated that her company gets their metrics from the skill reports. On the Avaya ACD at the skill level, abandons are measured once the call hits the "queue" via the queue to step in the vector logic. This means that any time spent pushing buttons on their prompter/IVR is not included in the time associated with delay to abandon or speed of answer. Therefore, throwing out abandons in less than 10 seconds does not include time spent listening to prompter/IVR messages and pressing buttons. If the caller abandons during that stage, the call wouldn't even register as a record in the *split tables. Only when the call hits the queue to step and is queued to a split/skill will it register. Given this, ICMI does recommend removing "short abandons" when calculating service level and abandon rate. In my opinion, if you are throwing out abandons greater than your service level threshold, you are "fudging" your abandon rate and service level.