Abandon Rate Definition

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.

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.