Percentage Calls Answered

Percentage Calls Answered

I am working on improving the PCA in my department and thought I would seek extra advice on what people feel affects Center PCA and also any recommendations on steps to maintain a high standard. Any existing models or statistical analysis would be fantastic.

Question asked by proof

Just Clarifying

Just clarifying… this is the percentage of calls that are answered, so you are looking to reduce your abandoned rate?

This is directly related to seconds to answer. So improve your service levels/seconds to answer and abandoned rate drops.

What your customers are used to also plays a big part in this… if you have had a 90%/10s service level for the last 5 years and you suddenly change it to 60%/40s then you will notice a major increase in abandoned calls, more than what you could expect in a call centre switching from 70%/30s.

I found that the expectations of our Hong Kong and Asian callers was much higher than our Australian callers so traditional metrics for abandoned rate just did not apply.

With thanks to qua3kers

Other Factors

See when your customers start to hang up. Then see if your IVR route or messages are not too long. Another factor might be extremely annoying wait music.

One thing I noticed once was that the after call work took more then we expected and agents let the phone ring, resulting in many calls dropped during the ring time, when they were no longer in the queue. Adding 10 seconds to the ACW was sufficient to solve this.

With thanks to houghi

Callback Solutions

Callback solutions can reduce abandoned calls thus increasing the % of calls you answer, if that is what you are looking at.

Driving this as a target for a team does lead to the risk of calls being completed more quickly than allows for a high quality interaction with the customer (if customer satisfaction is important to you as well).

With thanks to slambert

Author: Jonty Pearce