Is 10 seconds standard for abandonment rates?

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Posted Tue 10 July 2007 @ 10:04 a.m. by Sarah Putt

When do you start measuring abandoned calls? Ten seconds after the connection or 10 seconds after the voice announcement is complete? Or is there an entirely different industry standard?

That’s the query from one manager whose had conflicting advice on how long to allow before a counting an ‘abandoned call’. They had thought the industry standard was 10 seconds, but they were recently advised that as their voice announcement (which offers alternative contact numbers) is 29 seconds, abandoned calls shouldn’t be counted until 40 seconds (allowing for 10 seconds after the message).

And it’s interesting to note that one of the country’s largest contact centres, Work and Income which has 475 CSRs over five sites, has a 20-second target (according to a recent audit).

So what is an appropriate target – 10, 20 or 40 seconds? What is your contact centre’s target? Please post in comments below.

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7 comments

• Don says:

  Great question, every Contact Centre I have worked in recorded the target time after the customer selects the option they want, so I would say 40 secs in this situation. In my current company we have no IVR so our KPI's measures calls that abandon after 15 seconds of the call connecting. Another point to raise and discuss is what is an acceptable level of abandonment? The industry standard from what I know is less than 5%.

  Added: 11 July 2007, 9:54 a.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Grant says:

  The purpose of the "10 second" rule was to disregard callers who had called the wrong number, the idea being that the caller would hear the "Welcome to..." part of the message, realise they had rung the wrong number and hang up. 10 seconds is plenty of time for this situation to occur. As for the 5%, the industry standard TARGET is no more than 5% over a 24 hour period. That equates to 1 in 20 callers (aka Customers) who you don't even have the opportunity to assist. The reality is many customer focussed CC's regularly sit at 2% or even 1% abandoned, while others (who shall remain nameless) are unconcerned at rates exceeding 20%... Frightening.

  Added: 13 July 2007, 10:14 a.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Rowan says:

  Ours is 10 seconds before its even hit any voice message. Considering a lot of people hang up as soon as they hear a voice message you would possibly end up with an inaccurate result if counting 10 seconds from the end of the voice message, altho of course if looking at what should be the industry standard, maybe that would be the correct way?

  Added: 13 July 2007, 10:23 a.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• wokky says:

  I'd count from the IVR selection onwards - until then the customer is not "holding" - they're still deciding - but that depends on your interpretation of "holding" and "abandonment" - e.g. if your announcement advises of a fault, and your abandonment rate goes through the roof immediately post announcement, your IVR is working and those calls should be discounted from your abandoned rates, so defintiely post IVR metrics should be used.

  Added: 13 July 2007, 10:31 a.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Paul says:

  Be great to know the industry standard/norm! I have measured these differently across 2 different contact centres, currently all abandoned calls are measured from the second the customer selects from the IVR. The other way is to calculate this based on your service level calculation so if you were 90/20 that abandons are not included until after 20 seconds. I believe this gives you a credible calculation that falls in line with your service level/staff levels. I have worked with targets from 0.1% to 2%

  Added: 13 July 2007, 1:29 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Ian from COPC Inc says:

  Any call that is not answered is abandoned. There should be no "short abandon"threshold.

  Added: 3 August 2007, 6:56 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Dirk says:

  Ian, the question was not what defines an abandoned call, but at what point do you begin measuring the rate. The essense of the question is what rate is acceptable without compromising your CSAT and your profitability. There is no universal answer. Obviously, your AR for inbound sales or service queues should be quite low. Those are your bread and butter. But I've worked for outsource centers where the client allowed ARs as high as 12% for Customer Service calls. The logic was that there was no tangible revenue associated with the CS call, and the client actually saved money by not having to pay the outsourcer for those potential - but abandoned customer contacts. Obviously, the outsourcer had different goals, as they were getting paid for each contact. My point is that there are many different was to look at this question, and many different associated answers.

  Added: 27 May 2010, 1:53 a.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

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