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Call avoidance is a pervasive issue in call centers that negatively impacts productivity, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

Call avoidance happens  when agents deliberately or accidentally avoid talking to customers. Common causes for call avoidance include agent burnout, micro-management, and irate customers. A failure to address call avoidance–and the reasons behind it–damages customer experience and your business’s reputation..

This article explores what call avoidance is, its consequences and causes, and how you can prevent it from irreparably damaging your business.

 

What is Call Avoidance in Call Centers?

Call avoidance is any behavior that causes agents to ignore, miss, or fail to follow up with customer calls. Though call avoidance can be intentional,  it’s usually caused by poor workflows or unclear performance expectations instead of apathetic agents. Additional reasons for call avoidance include a lack of agent experience, job dissatisfaction, unrealistic performance expectations, and a high-pressure work environment.

Common examples of call avoidance include:

  • Intentionally Long Customer Holds: Agents sometimes keep customers on hold for extended periods of time to delay taking on difficult customer inquiries or avoid taking any other calls. The average customer is only willing to wait 2 minutes and 36 seconds before hanging up.[*] This misbehavior annoys customers and leads to poor customer satisfaction.
  • Prolonging after-call work: Taking too long on call wrap-up time delays the next customer interaction. Some agents use this avoidance tactic to cut the number of calls they handle per shift.
  • Leaving the phone off the hook: The agent will take themselves out of the queue by leaving the phone off the hook, preventing any new calls.
  • Taking excessive breaks or frequently logging out: By making themselves scarce, an agent can cut the number of calls they handle, putting more weight on their colleagues and delaying customer support.
  • Switching between available and unavailable statuses: Agents constantly switch up their user status to avoid being assigned a new call or queue.
  • Transferring or routing calls for pointless reasons: Some agents play “hot potato” with customers, sending them down to other departments even when they can handle the request. This leads to wasted time for both the customer and other staff, as well as longer resolution times.
  • Not ending the call when customers disconnect: This call avoidance strategy leads to the agent looking occupied, despite not taking on new calls.

Again, some of these instances are intentional actions that cause harm to the workplace and your business’ reputation. But others are just a result of unrealistic expectations, agent burnout, and poor workplace processes. Identifying why agents act the way they do is the most important step to curbing call avoidance.

 

What Causes Call Avoidance?

Call avoidance happens for a variety of reasons, but most can be classified as either  but most of them can be classified as either agent-driven or company-driven causes.

 

Agent-Driven Factors

Below are some of personal and individual factors that contribute to call avoidance:

  • Burnout: Agent burnout happens when agents succumb to the continuous pressure and stress that happens when working at a call center. This leads to mental exhaustion and g call avoidance behavior. 63% of call center agents experience high burnout rates.[*]
  • Low Morale: Unmotivated agents are not going to engage actively with your customers. If agents do not feel valued or supported, it will show in their refusal to take calls enthusiastically.
  • Lack of Training: Inadequate training creates unease and uncertainty within your staff as they lack confidence when handling calls which leads to avoidance. Agents who are unprepared may act on the anxiety of dealing with potentially difficult customers.
  • High Workloads: Agents are people at the end of the day. No one wants to be overburdened–especially not top agents, who may already be picking up the slack for some of their colleagues. Unrealistic, uneven workloads and understaffing leads to call avoidance.

 

Company-Driven Factors

Companies letting down their employees contributes to call avoidance in the following ways:

  • Poor Management: A lack of supervision or unorganized leadership means low accountability and even lower employee engagement.. Managers who fail to collect agent feedback or respond to concerns from team members  are responsible for increased call avoidance..
  • Workflow Inefficiencies: Overly complicated business processes and  outdated call center technologies annoy agents, making them disengage from calls and “phone it in.” Software with outdated knowledge bases, a lack of automation, and frequent crashes only compound inefficient workflows. Almost 86% of companies believe that outdated technology and inflexible systems hamper their ability to respond effectively to customer needs.[*]
  • Unrealistic KPIs: Unattainable targets and the pressure to meet them is discouraging to agents and causes them to find ways to avoid calls. Expectations need to be realistic, otherwise they lead to a counterproductive and demotivated work environment and culture.

 

How Call Avoidance Impacts Your Business

Call avoidance has widespread effects far beyond decreased agent productivity. It also affects  your customer experience, business reputation, and lower profits.

  • Reputational Damage: Negative customer experiences pay nasty dividends, like bad reviews and lowered brand trust. In the age of social media, all it takes is one bad customer complaint to go viral. 90% of consumers say they will not frequent a business with a bad reputation, and 87% of customers will reverse a purchase decision after reading negative news or reviews about a brand, company or product online.[*]
  • Lower Customer Retention: Customers will switch to a competitor when they have a poor service experience. Do not let a few bad interactions cause long-time customers to abandon you. 80% of customers said they have switched brands because of poor customer experience.[*]
  • Decreased Customer Satisfaction: Customers who experience any form of frustration as a result of long hold times and frequent call transfers will let you know about it. Extended hold times are one of the leading causes of lower customer satisfaction rates.
  • Higher Operational Costs: Call avoidance creates a backlog of unresolved issues which require even more labor and resources to fix.. The cost of handling repeat calls adds up in the long run. One case study report found that cutting repeat calls for one large national call center would yield savings up to $40 million annually.[*]

 

How to Identify Call Avoidance

Call center management can identify early signs of call avoidance by monitoring KPIs, conversational insights, and customer survey responses. To stop things from getting worse, monitor analytics and call center activities like:

  • Long Hold Times: If there are frequent long holds, monitor the duration of holds and compare them to industry benchmarks to see where potential call avoidance is happening.
  • Too Many Call Transfers: Unnecessary call transfers disturb the customer experience and serve as a clear indicator of call avoidance. Supervisors should track call routing and transfer rates per department and see whether agents are doing these transfers for legitimate reasons or if disciplinary action is needed.
  • Low Call Volume per Shift: If an agent consistently handles fewer calls than their peers despite similar call queues and shifts, this might be a sign of call avoidance.
  • Customer Complaints About Unresponsive Contact Center Agents: Your customers are the best source to see if agent performance is not up to standards. Listen to them when they talk about excessive holds, unexplained disconnections, or unresolved issues that could be linked directly to specific agents and departments.
  • Frequent “Not Ready”/Offline Status: Check to see if an agent is regularly switching to the unavailable status, as it could be intentional interference. Monitoring the duration and frequency of these statuses through workforce management software can help identify straddlers
  • Inconsistent Performance Metrics: A sudden drop in call center key performance indicators, like first-call resolution or average handling time (AHT), is a sign of call avoidance. Filter KPI reports by  agent or department to see who exactly might be engaging in call avoidance

 

Sneaky Tricks Agents Use to Avoid Calls

Some agents get creative when it comes to finding ways to avoid handling calls, making it challenging for managers to uncover and correct these behaviors. Here is a quick list of the most common tricks:

  • Deliberately muting or disconnecting calls, claiming it was a technical issue
  • Using the “Not Ready” or Break status frequently to avoid being queued for incoming calls
  • Claiming system crashes or slow software performance to delay answering calls
  • Taking extended bathroom breaks to cut time they should be on their phones
  • Hanging up on customers before they speak
  • Intentionally transferring calls to other agents to shirk their responsibilities onto someone else
  • Prolonging after-call work to cut the number of inbound calls they handle per hour

Technology like real-time phone call logs, analytics, and monitoring assists managers in tracking “red flags” so they can intervene accordingly. Implementing automated reporting flags, unusual behaviors and patterns, giving managers the chance to find the root cause and correct call avoidance issues before they become prevalent in their workplaces. Likewise,offering self-service options like chatbots and online portals saves customers and agents time on menial tasks.

 

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