Best Practices for Keeping Your Outbound Abandon Rate Low

Progressive dialers are a game-changer for high-volume campaigns, offering answering machine detection and ultra-efficiency with limited staff. However, the risk of abandoned calls—when a contact picks up but no agent is available to connect with them—necessitates diligent daily oversight to maintain compliance and ensure a positive customer experience. While you can't eliminate abandoned calls entirely, you can significantly reduce their frequency by tuning the right variables. In order to drive high conversion without the stress, you need to know what strategies are available to keep your abandon rate under control. 

Why should I care about abandon rate? 

Abandon rate, also known as abandonment rate, is the percentage of calls answered by humans that are abandoned. FTC regulations require that a campaign’s abandon rate be no more than 3% over a 30 day period, or over the course of the campaign (if shorter than 30 days).   

Abandoned calls not only have a legal cap but are bad for business. Contacts that answer a call but can’t connect to an agent are more likely to become frustrated and unsubscribe or choose to not pick up future calls. 

Strategies to manage your abandon rate

Start with a low calls/agent ratio and gradually increase

The more calls you place per available agent, the more likely it is that more than one of those calls will be answered, which will lead the other call to be abandoned. For progressive dialer campaigns, even those with low answer rates, it’s best to start with a low calls to agent ratio (e.g. 2:1) and validate your abandon rate is acceptable before increasing it. Regal allows you to increase calls/agent ratio for a campaign by decimal values (e.g. from 2 to 2.3) so you can gradually and safely gain efficiency while maintaining compliance and a high customer experience. 

Staff up

Properly staffing your campaign can significantly reduce the likelihood of abandoned calls: The more agents are available to handle answered calls, the more likely it is that when a contact picks up, there will be an agent available to connect with them. Here's a simple example: Let’s say your dialer places three calls each for two available agents. Agent 1 has two contacts pick up while Agent 2 has no contacts pick up. In this case, no contacts are abandoned since Agent 2 can handle the second answered call intended for Agent 1. If only Agent 1 was staffed, one of their calls would have been abandoned. The impact of this is multiplied the more agents you staff on your progressive dialer campaigns. 

It’s recommended to staff progressive dialer campaigns with at least 10 agents if using a 2+ calls/agent ratio. 

Allow your agents to focus on the campaign

Progressive dialer campaigns are most efficient when agents are dedicated only to these campaigns and no other outreach or asynchronous tasks. This focus helps them concentrate on the campaign goal at hand instead of context switching between outbound sales calls and their other work – responding to emails, updating a customer’s CRM profile, and handling inbound calls. In addition, it reduces your risk of abandoned calls: If the dialer places a call on behalf of an agent, and that agent becomes unavailable to handle the call (e.g. because they picked up an inbound call), the answered outbound call will get abandoned, increasing your abandon rate and decreasing the risk of conversion with the abandoned lead.  

Play a greeting recording

Playing a greeting recording not only reduces your abandon and hang-up rates but provides customers a smoother experience while they’re waiting to connect to an agent. While answering machine detection algorithms can be quick at determining whether a human or voicemail answered the call, every second the contact is met with silence increases the likelihood of their hanging up and eliminating your chance at a conversation. Common greetings include white noise, office ambience, and muffled voices asking “Hello?” or “Can you hear me?”. With Regal’s journeys, you can test a few different greetings to determine which is most effective at decreasing hangups and increasing conversations. 

Play an abandon message on abandoned calls

Despite efforts to minimize your abandon rate, some abandoned calls are inevitable. Regal allows you to play a recorded message in such cases, naming your company, explaining your reason for calling, apologizing for the inability to connect to an agent, and offering alternatives like requesting a callback. Playing a message on abandoned calls is not only required by the FTC, but it’s a more respectful way of handling the situation than hanging up. Treating your customers like royalty increases the chance that they’ll pick up on a future dial. 

Run your campaign with confidence

Regal empowers you to manage your abandon rate with real-time, campaign-specific reporting and easily configurable settings. Adjustments like lowering your calls-to-agent ratio or updating your greeting or abandon message take effect immediately, so you can make progress and validate experiments quickly. 

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