Have you ever hung up before the customer care executive received your message? Millions of customers are out there who have called customer care representatives and hung up before they reach the agent.
There could be a lot of reasons. For instance, the customers may have already solved the problem or got frustrated with the long waiting time. Poor customer service is the greatest reason for failing to satisfy your customers.
They are running out of time, so you cannot expect them to wait for a couple of minutes to reach you. Abandonment rate is a metric measured in the call center that determines the ratio of people who have ended their calls after joining the queue regardless of the reason for doing so.
Reducing the abandonment rate will definitely improve customer experience, and they will likely stick to your business in the long run. Poor customer experience is a big reason for losing customer loyalty.
A high abandonment rate is not good at all for the reputation of your business. It shows that you are either understaffed, or you are incapable of pulling your finger out.
Tips for reducing abandonment rate
Here are the tips to follow for reducing the abandonment rate:
Engage your customers with an activity
You have a lot of customers, so despite sufficient staff, you will likely take a bit longer time to receive the message from the customer already waiting in the queue. While waiting for you to take their message, you can possibly bore them by making them listen to the music
They will probably wait for a minute or two and then eventually hang up out of exasperation. Instead, you should engage them with activity while the phone is on hold. For instance, customers are often required to provide account details before the agent hears their queries.
This process could be done while the agent is busy with another customer, so when they come on the line, they have already all details so as to solve their problems at once. This will not only reduce the abandonment rate but will also help reduce the call time.
Offer call back service
Opting for a call-back service can truly help you whittle down the abandonment rate. Instead of having your customers on hold for a long time, you should provide them with an option of calling back.
In fact, you should immediately call such customers as soon as you get free from the current call. If your customer has hung up the call, you should immediately send them an apology message and ensure that you will call them back.
Giving your customers a callback option makes sense because it reduces their frustration. By doing so, you are saving time for your customers. The biggest advantage of providing this option is that you earn customer loyalty. They will appreciate that you value their time.
Increase your staff
If you have a lot of customers and you have been recently getting a lot of complaints or phone calls from them, you should increase your staff. The more customer care executives, the lower the waiting time and the lower the abandonment rate.
If you struggle with this problem only during peak times, you should schedule more staff for that particular period. However, it does not mean that the waiting time will turn to zero because sometimes all of them will be busy as some customers may come up with a complicated query or issue.
However, by increasing the staff of customer care executives, you will reduce the waiting time in the queue. As a result, fewer customers will hang up before they reach you. However, hiring the staff means additional resources to be put in. It will undoubtedly increase the cost of your business.
If it is too urgent and you think there is no other way around, you should opt for this alternative. In case your existing funds do not allow you to cover these expenses, you can take out loans for bad credit with no guarantor.
However, experts suggest that you optimize your current resources as much as possible. Ask your staff to be ready to attend as many calls as possible during peak hours. Invest in an app so users can resolve their most common queries there.
This will reduce the burden of customer calls for trivial problems, and hence the abandonment rate will lower. In order to make an app, you will need to spend some money.
If your cash reservoir does not allow it, do not fight shy of using unsecured loans for bad credit with instant decision. At the time of borrowing money, do not forget that business loans are usually expensive. Ponder over your repaying capacity.
Let the customer know the duration of wait time
Of course, your customers will become hacked off when they are put on hold and are not upon how long they are going to wait. Remember the fact that customers do not have a lot of time to wait on hold. This is why you should tell them the duration of their wait time, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and so on.
Getting an estimate for the wait time is not that easy. The calculation is done on the basis of the average time the customer care executives take to resolve the query. There are some advanced tools to use to find out the wait time based on the current scenario of busy executives.
After being told about the wait time, your customers will be pleased to know. They can accordingly schedule their call.
The bottom line
If you want to reduce the abandonment rate, you will have to optimize your existing tools. Increase your staff and ask them to resolve the issues to avoid prolonged call wait quickly.
If current sources are not sufficient, hire more people. Invest in an app so common queries of customers can get resolved through the app without needing you.
