Abandon rate · Abandonment rate
What is abandon rate and why is it your hidden ticket volume?
Abandon rate is the share of customers who drop off before reaching anyone. Those questions don't disappear, they return by email tomorrow.
In short
Abandon rate is the percentage of customers who break off a contact attempt before an agent was involved: a call hung up while waiting, a chat clicked away before an answer arrived, a contact form abandoned halfway. The number measures the volume you don't see in your ticket counts.
Calculation
Abandon rate = (abandoned contact attempts / total attempts) x 100
What you put in the numerator determines usefulness. Hanging up within five seconds is usually a wrong number rather than an abandonment; filtering those out makes the figure more honest. Measure per channel, because the expectation in chat is in seconds and on the phone in minutes.
Why this number is missing in most teams
An abandoned attempt produces no ticket, so it appears in no overview. A team can therefore report a beautiful response time over exactly those conversations that did get through, while a share of customers gave up before anything was counted.
That makes abandon rate the number that clashes most with your others. A team with a rising abandon rate and a falling response time isn't performing better; it's serving a smaller group.
Where the abandoned question goes
A customer who hangs up hasn't lost their question. They try again later, they email, or they look elsewhere. The first two mean you get the same work later anyway, usually with a less friendly opening line. The third is the consequence you don't measure.
So check whether your abandoned attempts and your email volume move against each other. A peak in abandonments around midday with a peak in email an hour later is the same work relocating to a channel where you handle it more slowly.
What to do about it without more people
Most abandonments disappear not by answering faster but by making the wait predictable. Someone who knows it'll be four minutes waits those four minutes more often than someone left in the dark. That holds in chat as much as on the phone.
The second intervention is offering an exit that isn't waiting. A callback request, or in chat the option to continue by email. That deliberately moves the work to a channel where the customer isn't waiting, instead of them doing it themselves without you knowing.
Where it goes wrong
Counting hang-ups within a few seconds
Those are wrong numbers and accidental calls. Including them raises your figure without a customer behind it.
Measuring chat and phone against the same standard
In chat someone drops off after tens of seconds, on the phone after minutes. One standard across both channels hides the channel where it's failing.
Hiding the queue to prevent abandonment
Not showing the wait sometimes lowers the number because people hang on longer, but their experience gets worse. Measure what satisfaction does alongside.
Viewing abandonments separately from email volume
They're often the same questions returning an hour later. Both numbers side by side show whether work disappears or relocates.
What to do this week
Look up per hour of the day how many calls and chats were abandoned, and put the number of incoming emails per hour beside it. If you see a peak in abandonments followed by a peak in email, that's the same work relocating to a slower channel. That's a staffing problem in one specific hour, not across your whole day.
What this looks like in a system
In Cuego abandoned chats and unanswered calls are counted and shown per hour, alongside the volume that was handled. In chat the visitor can continue the conversation by email instead of clicking away, so the question reaches you with the conversation history attached. For phone, a callback request can take the place of the queue, and that request arrives as a task with a name and a time.
VoiceRelated terms
Queue
A queue is the list of conversations waiting on someone. How you sort that list determines which customers you systematically help too late.
Read onFirst Response Time
First Response Time measures how long a customer waits for your first substantive answer. Automatic acknowledgements make the number look good without the customer knowing anything.
Read onContact ratio
Contact ratio is the number of customer questions per order. It's the only number you can't improve by working faster.
Read on