What Is the Abandon Rate?

The abandon rate is the percentage of tasks that are abandoned by the customer before completing the intended task. There are two common industries where the abandon rate is a commonly used metric. The first is in call centers, the second is e-commerce.

In marketing, abandonment rate is a term associated with the use of virtual shopping carts. Also known as “shopping cart abandonment”. Although shoppers in brick and mortar stores rarely abandon their carts, abandonment of virtual shopping carts is quite common. Marketers can count how many of the shopping carts used in a specified period result in completed sales versus how many are abandoned. The abandonment rate is the ratio of the number of abandoned shopping carts to the number of initiated transactions or to the number of completed transactions.

Around 10 sources of information is used when buying online. (e.g. webshops, review websites, social networks, and the like) before making a decision. In this process the shopper compares at least 5 different websites for the product in which he has interest in and spends up to 20 hours researching online. This means, that shopping online is not as easy as some predicted 20 years ago.

From both business and scientific perspectives, researchers and practitioners have investigated the problem of online shopping abandonment, trying to understand and address the causes of such low conversion rates. They concurred mostly on the following factors: the biggest problems, for online cart abandonment were lack of transparency, not fully disclosed transaction and delivery costs and lack of trust in the online seller. It was also discovered that a website that functions poorly is abandoned faster. a few more things were that there were not enough alternatives, that there the ordering process was to complicated.

How the Abandon Rate Works

The abandon rate is an important metric, as it provides the company with information regarding customer habits and can be a predictor of their satisfaction levels. For an inbound call center, the abandon rate is the percentage of inbound phone calls made to a call center or service desk that is abandoned by the customer before speaking to an agent. It is calculated as abandoned calls divided by total inbound calls.

Abandon rates have a direct relation to waiting times. The longer the time that customers must wait before being connected to an agent, the higher the abandon rate is likely to be as people get tired of waiting for assistance and hang up before reaching an agent.

The abandon rate for online retailers is the percentage of shoppers who abandon their virtual carts without completing check-out procedures. It is calculated by the number of abandoned shopping carts divided by total initiated transactions. Even when carts are abandoned, online retailers can use customer information gleaned from the cart contents to improve their marketing and sales techniques.

Special Considerations

For call centers, high abandon times may indicate under-allocation of resources to the call center or help desk by the company and can saddle a company with the reputation of offering poor customer service. It may also result in lost sales opportunities and highly dissatisfied customers, as anyone who has spent a significant amount of time waiting in a virtual queue for customer service can attest.

For online retailers, it might indicate that the retailer has prices that are higher than its competitors. It is possible that before checking out, a customer searched other sites for price comparison and ended up buying their goods from another online source. Often times, online retailers will use the information provided by abandoned carts to enhance their marketing techniques and may end up selling promotional items to the owner of the abandoned cart in an effort to complete the sale.

The retailer can also look for trends as to what types of products are most often abandoned and then increase their sales efforts around those products in an attempt to decrease the abandonment rate.

The abandoned call percentage KPI—also known as the abandonment rate—measures how many callers disconnect or hang up from a call center before they can speak to an agent or representative. While this is usually measured as a performance metric, it also is closely tied to customer satisfaction and success KPIs, as it exhibits how many people are angry or impatient enough to leave before receiving assistance.

How to Monitor Call Center Abandon Rate?

Call center abandonment is a critical KPI that must be closely monitored at all times. When attempting to measure it accurately, there are a number of drawbacks to be aware of. Numbers alone don’t always say the whole tale. To fully understand what is going on in your center, you need to understand the meaning behind the figures.

There are a few important points to bear in mind if you want to prevent many of the common issues associated with calculating call center abandonment rates and provide reliable call center analytics.

How does the Abandon Rate Work?

The abandonment rate is a crucial metric because it gives the company insight into consumer preferences and can predict customer satisfaction levels. The abandon rate for an inbound call center is the percentage of inbound phone calls made to a call center or service desk that the customer abandons before communicating with an employee. It’s measured as the number of abandoned calls divided by the total number of inbound calls.

The rate of abandonment is proportional to the length of time spent waiting. The longer consumers wait before speaking with an agent, the higher the abandon rate will be, as people get frustrated waiting for help and hang up before speaking with an agent.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The number of abandoned incidents divided by the total number of incidents is the general formula for calculating the abandoned rate.