Few second abandoned calls CMS report

[kurayami]

Got a question in CMS reporting. There's a lot of instances in which the report has abandoned calls that are about 1-2 seconds. But that's very odd since all of our agents are in auto-answer mode. And we checked our phantom-abandon call timer and it is 'off'. Should we turn the timer on? Or is there something else that causes this problem?

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[Stinney]

Are you using VOA announcements? I discovered that if an agent hangs up while the VOA is playing the system pegs it as an abandon call. You could have an agent playing games.

- Stinney

Favorite all too common vendor responses: "We've never seen this issue before." AND "No one's ever wanted to use it like that before.

 

[johnwtek]

The abandon time is important, because you want to know if your customers are getting tired of waiting for an agent to answer.

If you have a lot of abandoned calls in the 1-2 second range, it may be a good thing, as this can indicate callers know that they will usually get through quickly, and therefore choose to call back in a few minutes, rather than listening to music and announcements.

So if your agents are handling calls efficiently, and are not overloaded most of the time, a customer may choose to call back 2-3 times, so that they won't have to wait in the queue. If you are paying for a toll-free line, this can also save on long-distance charges, as well.

 

[kurayami]

well we do but doesn't work when in auto-answer mode. Only works when in manual-answer. Happens when a call enters the agent of course in CMS you can see the "ring" icon then suddenly the call was dropped before the call was answered. The agent didn't release or drop the call. Then a 0-1 second abandon time is registered. Any ideas? This is very troublesome since we consider this as an invalid abandoned call.


"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."
-Douglas Adams

 

[johnwtek]

I guess it's possible you have a problem, but it's hard to be sure. IIRC, the busiest queue that I worked with did have maybe 10% of the calls abandoned, but since we could find no problems testing, and callers had no complaints, we didn't worry about it. (Of course, these were all mostly repeat callers; you might want to be a lot more careful if you are having a large number of one-time callers.)

Questions:
[ol]
[li]Are you having more than 10% or 20% abandoned calls during any time periods?[/li]

[li]Have there been any complaints from callers (that their calls are getting cut off or dropped)?[/li]

[li]Have you tried calling a dozen or so times (from an outside line to the 800 #) to see if any of your calls get dropped? (Testing should probably be during a fairly busy time, so that your call is queued at least part of the time.)[/li]

[li]You stated, "we do but doesn't work when in auto-answer mode. Only works when in manual-answer." Were you referring to VOA-announcements?[/li]

[/ol]
You might check the manual on that phantom-abandon call timer; I believe I used to set it so that it would ignore abandoned calls unless the caller waited in the queue for at least 5 seconds. (That also tends to reduce the chance of counting a call when a caller has dialed the wrong number.)

I'm afraid I've never used CMS, and it's been a while since I worked with BCMS. We might have to see if someone with more knowledge has any ideas.