3CX Phone - Abandoned Phone Calls

[kriley87]

Hello-

I am running V16 with call queues using the 3CX softphone and noticing something strange with regards to Abandoned Calls that are showing in the softphone application. I'm coming from FreePBX and to my knowledge, an Abandoned Phone Call is a call where the caller hangs up before someone picks up the call or the call goes to voicemail.

The way we have the call queues configured at this time is to allow for a maximum hold time of 45 seconds for all call queues and at that time, the call will be directed to another call queue that functions as an overflow queue.

What I'm noticing is that calls that hit the first queue timeout of 45 seconds and then are transferred to the overflow queue, the initial call to the first queue is logged as Abandoned within the 3CX softphone application.

Is this normal? The call isn't technically abandoned if the queue timeout limit was reached and the call was transferred else where is it?

Thank you for any clarification you can provide.

 

[AWS2P]

You are right , calls shouldn't be labelled "abandonned call" in that case, but for first Q call is forwarded by DNA so 3CX count this as abandonned even if technically call is redirected and finally answered elsewhere.
3CX should improve this to avoid to count an abandonned call if really it's not.

 

[kriley87]

Yeah I have to say, that's pretty disappointing because this will completely skew the call reports... In this scenario, that should be labeled as a transferred call, not an abandoned call.

Can a 3CX staff member weigh in here please?

 

[Joseph Oimi]

This definitely a bad bit of code here, been testing this for a while now.

A abandoned call (aka a lost call in the reports) = A call that has hung up while waiting in the queue, its also a call that is transferred to another extension after the time out.

From a managers point of view they will receive this alert and begin double handling the call as they believe they lost a customer. This is terrible. Do you know how embarrassing it is to explain to a customer a double'd up call because your phone system told you you lost a call where you didnt actually.

From the reports viewpoint
Lost call queue and transferred out of the queue are bundled together - this is a false statistic and terrible for managing performance of staff because the customers were still reached.

A better definition needs to be created here 3CX this is not good enough and giving the customers wrong statistics

A Abandoned call is a customer sitting on hold listening to music waiting for some one to answer , if in a queue park, hold ,group etc - If the call is terminated from the callers side while on hold this is a customer who is feed up. These are the the most important calls to catch.

A Queue overflow call is exactly that the customer has waited too long and overflowed, but this statistic should be measured somewhere so the managers can work out how many overflows happen per Queue daily. It must be removed from the lost call/abandoned statistic.

Also reports needs to corrected as well due to terminology being different than application menus.

Can 3cx quality assurance please check this area was tested.

 

[Tommie Pit]

Well. In essence, this is correct. The call is not answered in due time by your primary queue, thus abandoned. However, since so many of us use this type of call flow overflow, a new status to this call would be much appreciated also by me. If we have to second guess our reports abandoned calls counter, its not of much use.

 

[JohnS_3CX]

Hi @kriley87

No need for a staff member to weigh in, we already make it pretty clear in the 3CX Academy:

A call is considered abandoned if a call reaches the Destination if no Answer, or if the caller hangs up the call before it can be answered by an agent.

https://www.3cx.com/3cxacademy/videos/advanced/call-queues/ - You can read the course content for slide 15 by pressing 'S' or by clicking here

 

[kriley87]

Hi @JohnS_3CX

Interesting... coming from using FreePBX for 10+ years, a call is considered abandoned if the caller hangs up the call before it can be answered by an agent. If a call is transferred from one queue to another by use of the fail over destination, then nothing is logged in the reports because the original call is still considered in progress.

Not that I expect 3CX to operate identically or follow the exact terminology of FreePBX, but treating a call that reaches the Destination No Answer from one queue that is transferred over to another queue as an abandoned call is just flat out incorrect. At the very least that call should be classified as transferred.

Using "Overflow Queues" is quite a common practice and logging calls that are transferred from one queue to another queue as abandoned will skew the call reports. What's the point of having an abandoned call report if you can't accurately show the number of true unanswered phone calls?

The whole point of having an abandoned call report is to assess if your agents are doing their jobs. If that report isn't accurate then you can't hold them accountable.

In the current state, one queue may show 50+ abandoned calls for a day but it's not because the calls were missed & the agents weren't doing their jobs, it's because they had high call volume that day and were all on the phone so those 50+ calls were directed to the overflow queue and were serviced by another team.

Clearly I'm not the only one who feels this design is flawed.

 

[JohnS_3CX]

I can appreciate of course that for your use case where you have a different objective, this does not work as intended, and that there is rarely such a thing as one size fits all when it comes to these things.
By our definition it's working as intended because it does what we designed it to do.

I can only suggest to get this posted in the ideas section at the moment, or adapt the system and the way you handle your reports to take the above facts into consideration when assessing agent performance.

Having personally worked in similar environments in the past, I was part of queues that had no overflow, and abandoned meant hangups, or ones that reached a time limit and expired. I was also part of queues with an overflow (for handling higher priority customers) and our overflow was again considered as abandoned by management, because they didn't really want the second queue to speak with the top customers if it can be avoided. They wanted them to be served by more experienced agents, and anything seen as abandoned was both hangups or overflow. They would then look at why all agents were busy at the time (ie unusually high demand that day or systems failure causing complaints) and take that into consideration when later assessing performance. Again, not saying you are wrong, but there is no one size fits all.

So clearly it is only flawed if not working as designed (vs not working as intended for each specific deployment).

 

[AWS2P]

I don't want to argue, but I think Kriley point of view is more the one it should be in 3CX, this is the logical way to handle all the call situation and give clear count result in statistics.

 

[cobaltit]

So I think the problem here is the mechanism used to defined 'abandoned'. @kriley87 is suggesting that calls that a are 'transferred' to another queue (aka overflow) not be counted as abandoned. While I understand the logic the why, you need to understand that anything that hits the DNA is considered abandoned by 3CX regardless of what the actual destination is. So until the ideas sections gets enough votes and 3CX decides to implement more granular reporting, you have a couple choices:

• Change your queue structure to used prioritized hunt or skill based routed to consolidate your primary queue and overflow queue into one queue.
• Do custom reporting (which many of my customers do for more specific reporting) that can match up the 'abandoned' calls from the first queue with calls that hit the overflow to get the metrics to match your vision.

I'm sure there are folks on the forums here that could help with the second part. @voiptoys or @Cjay come to mind.

 

[VoIP Admin]

Sounds like there are two different views on this topic, and while I can understand the system is operating as designed, I hope that 3CX development team are interested to hear views that can make their product better.
In a complex environment I would like to have a status code that describes exactly what happened to the call progress, eg: Abandonded means the caller hangs up, where as Transfer means the queue hangs up (even better if queue transfers were identified as Queue Transfer). This way we do not need to resort to some complex external reporting system to match the transfers and exclude them, and we still have the complexity to analyse our call behaviour in a sophisticated manner.
Managers really don't care about excuses, they just want a very clear indication of the call progress. When they are looking at the Wall Board and it says 200 Calls came in and 190 Calls were abandonded because the callers moved from high speed primary queue to the low speed secondary queue because someone was away sick, but the call was still taken care off in the secondary queue, then the abandonded figure is meaningless and inaccurate, the caller did not hangup, the call was not abandonded.
If the system had an option where we could select whether to report Caller Hangs up as Abandonded and Caller was Transferred as Transferred, then that would give the best of both worlds and allow organisations to select the level of reporting that suits their business needs.
I love 3CX, I think it is a great product and I hope we use it for many years, get many great updates and features along the way. This seems to me like a very simple thing to implement in the reporting system, and I can't even see a reason why it would not be done if it makes the reporting more accurate and comprehensive. I hope to see this sort of improvement in a future update.