Call abandonment rate
What the abandonment rate measures, how to calculate it, and what actually lowers it.
The short answer
What is call abandonment rate?
Call abandonment rate is the percentage of inbound calls in which the caller hangs up before reaching anyone, usually while waiting on hold, in a queue or in a phone menu. It is calculated by dividing abandoned calls by all inbound calls and multiplying by 100. A high rate means callers wait too long or give up on the menu, and each abandoned call may be a lost customer. Many teams leave out very short calls, such as wrong numbers.
How to calculate it
Divide the number of abandoned calls by the total number of inbound calls, then multiply by 100. If you leave out very short calls, choose a cut-off of a few seconds, remove those calls from both numbers, and keep the same cut-off every month.
- Worked example: 500 inbound calls in a month, 60 of them abandoned, 10 of those within the first 5 seconds. Leaving those 10 out gives 50 abandoned calls out of 490, so the abandonment rate is about 10.2%.
- Callers who hang up on voicemail are often not counted as abandoned by phone systems at all, so look at missed calls too.
What it means for a small business
Callers abandon when they wait, so the fix is to make them wait less: answer at busy times, shorten or remove the phone menu, and offer a callback instead of hold. An AI agent can take the overflow: with Daber AI, ten calls arriving at the same moment are answered at the same moment, and anything that needs a person is transferred or turned into a callback request.
Questions
What's the difference between an abandoned call and a missed call?
An abandoned call is one where the caller hung up while waiting in your system, on hold or in a menu. A missed call is one nobody picked up at all, often ending in voicemail. Both are callers who didn't get help, so track both.
How do I reduce call abandonment?
Cut the wait. Add cover at your busiest hours, send overflow calls to an AI agent instead of a queue, keep any phone menu short, and offer a callback when nobody is free.
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