Call avoidance: Spotting if your agents are dodging calls and helping combat it

A call or contact centre can be an incredibly stressful work environment. From dealing with irate customers on the phone, to monitoring an increasing number of messaging channels, there are numerous reasons why contact centre agents may feel like they need a break.

Unfortunately, taking unscheduled breaks from calls can have many negative impacts. This is known as call avoidance, and it can be a big problem for call centres, their customers, and their employees.

I’m going to dig deeper into call avoidance, taking a look at how and why agents do it, and the impacts it can have. Then, I’ll suggest some of the best ways to combat it in your call centre.

What is call avoidance?

Call avoidance is when call centre agents employ tactics to limit the number of incoming calls they take.

It can have a number of negative impacts on the overall performance of a call centre, including increasing wait times and reducing customer satisfaction scores.

Call avoidance tricks your agents may employ

There are a number of ways that call centre agents can try and avoid taking calls. Particularly crafty agents may come up with call avoidance tricks and tactics that are almost undetectable.

Here are some examples of how agents may try to get away with call avoidance:

Manipulating the system

Depending on the specific features of your telephony system, there may be things call centre agents can do to manipulate it and get out of taking calls.

For example, your call routing system may be set up to direct calls to the agent who has been idle the longest. If an agent can manually switch themselves to unavailable, they could use this to periodically make it look as if they’re taking calls, then move themselves to the back of the queue again.

Dragging out post-call admin

Some calls legitimately require a good deal of post-call admin. This could involve updating customer records, writing up notes to add to customer relationship management (CRM) systems, or sending out additional information to the customer via email or SMS.

While this work is important, there may be instances where agents drag it out in order to avoid answering fresh calls. They may even fabricate post-call admin entirely.

Taking liberties with breaks

Obviously, it’s important that all your call centre agents take regular breaks. This helps them to stay focused, and provide the best possible service to your customers once they start taking calls again.

Some unscrupulous agents may take liberties with their breaks, however. Whether it’s dragging out their allocated lunch break, or taking lengthy toilet breaks every couple of hours, agents can take advantage of breaks as a way to stay off the phones for much longer than they should be.

Inventing “technical faults”

There’ll be very few call centres that have never experienced a technical fault. From a crackly phone line to a crashed computer, there are many issues that can make life more difficult for your call centre agents.

Knowing this, it may be tempting for agents to invent faults to help them get out of taking calls for a bit. After all, nobody’s going to expect them to keep taking calls while they’re waiting for IT to come fix their computer, right?

Agents may pretend to not be able to hear customers on the line properly and transfer them to another agent to get out of the call. Some may even pretend not to hear the customer at all when they pick up and wait for them to ring off.

The impact of call avoidance in call centres

Call avoidance in a call centre can have a wide range of negative impacts on your business, agents and customers alike.

Poor employee morale

All it takes is for one agent to start avoiding calls, and every other agent suddenly becomes busier as a result. Having to pick up the slack for a colleague who’s not pulling their weight can be frustrating, and can soon lead to poor employee morale.

Poor morale often leads to poor performance. An increased workload for agents can also contribute to employee burnout. All these factors may culminate in high employee churn, and a generally more inefficient call centre.

Decreased customer satisfaction

Call avoidance is likely to lead to longer customer waits and average handling time. Unsurprisingly, this has a direct impact on customer satisfaction.

Customers expect their queries to be resolved in a timely, professional manner. An agent who goes out of their way to avoid calls, and provides poor customer service as a result, can therefore severely impact the customer experience.

Lower customer retention rate

If customers are routinely experiencing poor customer service, they’re much less likely to want to continue doing business with you.

Having to spend a long time on hold to have their queries resolved—or not getting them resolved at all—will often encourage customers to start looking for alternative services.

This leads to increased customer churn, and a lower customer retention rate.

Increased operational costs

The inefficiencies caused by call avoidance can ultimately impact your business’ bottom line. Call centres may become unable to handle the volumes of calls they should, which may result in you having to hire new staff in order to make up the shortfall.

A customer who’s been impacted by call avoidance is also much more likely to escalate their issue. This leads to increasingly complex and time-consuming interactions as their issues grow, with supervisors and managers often needing to step in to help.

Poor brand reputation

Call avoidance doesn’t simply lead to your existing customers leaving. It can also prevent potential customers from joining you in the first place.

A business that develops a reputation for poor customer service is much less likely to attract new customers.

If a customer receives poor customer service due to call avoidance, they’re likely to quickly tell their friends and colleagues, which will harm your brand reputation. They may even leave a negative review online, which can harm your reputation among a much wider demographic.

Examples of call avoidance strategies to address the problem

Call avoidance can be a big problem for your call centre. Luckily, there are several useful strategies you can use to stamp it out:

Identify the underlying causes

The first step in tackling call avoidance is to understand what’s causing it. Without taking steps to address the root cause, any measures you put in place will be nothing more than a sticking plaster.

There could be any number of reasons that call avoidance examples crop up in your call centre; illness, burnout, or lacking the proper equipment or training could all play a part. Rather than simply disciplining agents who have been avoiding calls, try to understand what has led them to that point.

In doing so, you may discover a deeper issue that, when tackled, solves your call avoidance problems on a larger scale.

Look at call analytics

Call analytics are a valuable weapon in the war on call avoidance. Tracking your call handling metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) will help you to identify behaviours linked to call avoidance.

For example, abnormally short call durations or high call abandonment and call transfer rates could indicate that call avoidance is taking place.

Clean and easy to understand call centre dashboards will help you to view and understand your metrics, and quickly identify any anomalies. Dialpad’s call centre dashboards display key metrics such as missed and abandoned calls, call duration, and call transfers.

You’re even able to search for commonly occurring keywords in customer conversations, which may help you to identify tricky topics that are leading to call avoidance.

Utilise call monitoring

Call monitoring is another useful tool when trying to identify instances of call avoidance. You should go back and review recorded calls as often as possible, looking for signs of call avoidance.

These could include agents hanging up prematurely, not answering queries in a satisfactory manner, or unnecessarily transferring calls.

Dialpad gives you the tools you need to carefully monitor your agents. You can go back and review recorded calls, and listen in to active calls as they happen.

AI-powered sentiment analysis even provides insight into how a call is going in real-time, allowing contact centre managers to step in and assist if their agent is struggling.

Carry out coaching

Coaching sessions provide a great way for you to interact with your agents. You can use them to share information on new techniques, technologies, and practices, as well as your expectations when it comes to call avoidance.

With Dialpad, you can create playlists of recorded calls that can be shared during coaching sessions. These are a useful resource for showing your agents what they should, and shouldn’t, be doing.

Coaching sessions also provide a forum to gather feedback from your agents, and ask about any problems they may be having that could lead to increased call avoidance.

Adopt an omnichannel approach

Overworked, burnt out call centre agents are more likely to practise call avoidance. You can help to reduce the workload for your call centre agents by establishing an omnichannel contact centre.

This allows customers to contact you through a variety of channels, including SMS, instant messaging, email, or live chat. This provides your customers with more options when they wish to get in touch, allowing them to communicate through a channel that suits them, their needs, and their schedule.

It also helps to reduce the strain on your call centre agents, and allows them more time to focus on the calls they do receive to provide stellar customer service.

Dialpad Ai Contact Centre provides a huge number of features that make setting up and running an omnichannel contact centre a breeze.

Chief among these features are those powered by contact centre AI, which include super-accurate transcription, Real-Time Assist cards to help agents deal with the trickiest calls, and more.

Review customer feedback

Customer feedback can be a great source of insight alongside your contact centre analytics. Post-call surveys, online reviews, and customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys can all provide indicators of call avoidance.

One of the biggest obstacles with using customer feedback to identify call avoidance is that customers are often reluctant to provide it. The Dialpad Ai CSAT feature can help to remedy this, however.

Using Ai CSAT, customer satisfaction scores are inferred for every customer call, regardless of whether or not they fill out a survey. This provides a much greater sample size for analysis, allowing you to dig into the numbers to identify instances of call avoidance, or other issues.

Supervisors can also use Dialpad’s AI-powered QA scorecards to help determine whether or not agents are performing adequately. Able to help you assess factors such as product knowledge, problem solving, and more, scorecards also make it easier to track agent performance over time.

Get proactive: Draft a call avoidance policy to stop the problem recurring

If you want to nip call avoidance in the bud, a call avoidance policy is a great place to start. This policy sets down guidelines that your agents will be expected to adhere to.

Here are just a few key elements and considerations to help you draft your call avoidance strategy:

Address specific concerns

A call avoidance policy will work best if it’s specifically tailored to your organisation. If there are call avoidance tactics that you know are in play in your call centre, make sure they’re addressed directly.

Consider onboarding and training

It may be that your agents are avoiding calls because they don’t feel fully prepared to deal with them. This could indicate gaps in your onboarding and training procedures.

Ensure that all your agents undergo a comprehensive onboarding process, and are equipped with all the skills they need to perform in their role by the end of it.

Lay out expectations clearly

Your call avoidance policy should clearly outline the expectations you have for your call centre agents. This should include what behaviours are deemed acceptable and unacceptable when it comes to call avoidance.

Make sure policies regarding breaks are clear, to avoid misinterpretation, and lay out expectations for practices such as post-call admin.

Apply metrics and monitoring

Outline which metrics you’ll be using to identify call avoidance. This will inspire your agents to strive for excellence in these areas.

You can reinforce desired behaviours among your agents through regular feedback, quality coaching, and team meetings. This will provide them with the tools they need to consistently meet their own personal goals, and meet business KPIs.

Tackle call avoidance in call centres the right way & get happier customers AND agents

Tackling call avoidance is essential for ensuring that your call centre runs efficiently, and that your customers have a satisfactory experience.

Whether it’s drafting a call avoidance policy, reviewing customer feedback, or digging into your call analytics, there are numerous call avoidance strategies you can use. From helping you to track your metrics, to providing valuable resources for coaching, Dialpad Ai Contact Centre can help you to reduce call avoidance, whatever the underlying causes.