What are abandoned calls in a queue, and how do you reduce them?

What it actually is

Anyone who has ever called a service center knows the moment: music, a message saying "all agents are busy," more music, and at some point — a hang-up. From the caller's point of view, they gave up. From the PBX's point of view, this is an abandoned call: a call that came in, waited, and ended without a person answering it.

It is worth telling two close terms apart. A missed call is any call that no one answered — for example an extension that rang until it went to voicemail, or an office that was closed. An abandoned call is usually a special case: the caller is the one who hung up, while still waiting for an answer — most often in a queue.

Why does this matter? Because a missed call can sometimes be explained — the office was closed, the message was left in the voicemail box. An abandoned call says something else: the person wanted to talk right now, the office was open, and still they got no answer. It is a direct measure of whether enough people are answering, and whether the wait is reasonable.

Why people hang up

The obvious reason is a long wait, but it is not the only one:

• Uncertainty: the caller does not know how much longer they will wait. Five minutes while knowing you are second in line is easier than two minutes with no information at all.
• Silence: waiting with no music and no message sounds like a disconnected call, and people hang up and try again.
• A long menu: if it takes a minute and a half just to reach the queue through the IVR menu, some of the patience is already gone.
• A repeated message: "Your call is important to us" every twenty seconds irritates more than it calms.
• An inconvenient time: someone who calls during a lunch break or between classes cannot wait long, even if they want to.
• A wrong number: a small share of the hang-ups are simply people who realized they reached the wrong place.

How to measure: the abandonment rate

The common measure is called the abandonment rate (Abandon Rate): out of the calls that entered the queue, how many ended with the caller hanging up before an answer. If 400 calls entered the queue in a week and 40 of them were abandoned, the abandonment rate is ten percent.

To keep the number fair, it is common not to count very short hang-ups — for example someone who hung up in the first five seconds. Most of these are people who dialed by mistake, or changed their mind right away. If you count them, the picture looks worse than it is.

Beyond the rate itself, it is worth looking at:

• When exactly: at which hours and days there are the most abandoned calls. There are almost always clear "peak hours."
• After how long: if most callers hang up after a minute and a half, that is the limit of their patience — and it is the target to meet.
• Who called back: how many of the callers who hung up called again within an hour. If almost all did, the problem is convenience. If few did, you probably lost them.
• Which queue: if you have several queues, the differences between them show where people are missing.

What counts as a reasonable rate

There is no single number that suits everyone, and the numbers vary a lot between industries. In large service centers the usual aim is an abandonment rate below five percent, and a rate above ten percent is generally considered a sign that agents are missing at certain hours.

In a small organization — a yeshiva office, a gemach, a nonprofit — the numbers are less stable. When twenty calls come in a day, two abandoned calls are already ten percent. So in places like these it is better to look at the calls themselves: who called, when, and how long they waited — and make sure you call each of them back.

And the most important measure in a small organization is not the percentage, but the simple question: Did we get back to everyone?

First step: an organized queue instead of ringing

Many small organizations start with one extension or a ringing group, and nothing beyond that. When everyone is busy, the caller hears endless ringing or a busy tone — and hangs up. In that case, you do not always even know they called.

A queue changes the picture. The caller enters an organized waiting list, hears music on hold and announcements, and the system distributes the calls to agents in order. Every call that comes in is recorded, and every hang-up is counted. This is the basis for everything else: you cannot reduce what you do not measure.

It is also worth checking the path to the queue. If the caller goes through three menus before arriving, it may be possible to shorten it. Every ten seconds saved in the menu is ten seconds of patience left for the wait.

Position announcement and estimated wait

One of the most effective tools against abandonment is simply telling the caller where they stand. "You are third in line" or "The estimated wait is about two minutes" turn an annoying wait into an understandable one. A person who knows they are close will wait. A person who knows it will take long can decide to call back later, instead of waiting and hanging up in anger.

There is a separate article on this: Queue position announcement. In short — it is worth playing the position when the caller enters the queue, and repeating it about every minute, no more than that.

Callback service: "We'll call you back"

Instead of making the caller wait, you can offer them to leave the queue and receive a call back. This is called a callback service. The caller presses a key, confirms their number, and hangs up — and the system saves their place. When an agent becomes free, the caller gets a call.

This solves exactly the problem of people who have no time to wait: a mother between errands, a kollel fellow on a break between sessions. Instead of hanging up and maybe not calling again, they leave the queue without losing their place — and for measurement purposes, their call does not count as abandoned.

Alerts: knowing right away that someone gave up

Even with a good queue, some calls will be abandoned. The difference between an organization that loses them and one that rescues them is how fast it finds out. An email alert for every abandoned call — with the number, the time and how long the caller waited — lets you call them back within minutes, while the matter is still fresh for them.

In practice it works like this: someone in the office is in charge of the alerts inbox. Every alert is a task: call back, and note that you did. By the end of the day, no alert is left without a response. There is a separate article on this: Missed call alerts.

It is worth remembering that many callers who hang up do not leave a message. The alert is sometimes the only way to know they called at all.

Calling callers back — the right way

A return call to a person who hung up is an opportunity, but also a sensitive one. A few rules:

• Quickly: within an hour, and preferably within a quarter of an hour. After a day, the person has already found another solution — or gotten angry.
• From the organization's number: so that the person recognizes who is looking for them and answers.
• With a clear opening sentence: "Hello, this is Rachel from the yeshiva office. We saw that you called a few minutes ago and we didn't get to answer."
• Check first: maybe the person already called again and got an answer. You can see this in the call log.
• Write it down: that you called back, and what it was about, so that no one calls them a second time.

Planning around peak hours

When you look at the abandoned calls over two or three weeks, a pattern almost always shows up. On Sunday morning there are twice as many calls. The day before a holiday — three times as many. At the start of registration for an institution — a wave of calls. And in most organizations, the abandoned calls are concentrated in an hour or two a day, not spread over the whole day.

This is good, because it means you do not need to add agents for the whole day — only for those hours. You can add a person to the queue at peak hours, shift breaks, or build a layered hunt group: when the regular agents are busy, the call also goes to additional staff in the office.

An example from the field

The "Lev Cham" nonprofit (a made-up name) hands out food baskets before the holidays. In the two weeks before Pesach, the phone never stops. In the first year they had one extension that rang for two volunteers. When both were talking, callers heard a busy tone. No one knew how many people called and got no answer.

In the second year they built a queue. Already in the first week they saw that almost a quarter of the calls were abandoned — most of them between ten and twelve in the morning. They added a third volunteer for those hours, turned on the position announcement, and offered a callback service to anyone who waited more than two minutes. In addition, every abandoned call sent an alert to the coordinator's email, and she called back every caller by the end of the day.

The abandonment rate dropped below ten percent. And more important — almost everyone who hung up was called back the same day.

And what about calls outside business hours

A call that comes in at ten at night, when the office is closed, is not exactly "abandoned" — no one was supposed to answer. But it is a missed call, and someone needs to call back. It is worth handling separately: time-based routing that sends it to a clear message with the business hours, and a voicemail box whose messages reach email.

When you mix the two types in one report, the picture gets confused: it looks like there are many abandoned calls, when in fact most of them came at night. It is better to measure abandonment only during the hours when the queue is open, and handle the night calls in a separate "call back in the morning" list.