Silent Abandonment in Text-Based Contact Centers: Identifying, Quantifying, and Mitigating its Operational Impacts

In the quest to improve services, companies offer customers the option to interact with agents via texting. Such contact centers face unique challenges compared to traditional call centers, as measuring customer experience proxies like abandonment and patience involves uncertainty. A key source of this uncertainty is silent abandonment, where customers leave without notifying the system, wasting agent time and leaving their status unclear. Silent abandonment also obscures whether a customer was served or left. Our goals are to measure the magnitude of silent abandonment and mitigate its effects. Classification models show that 3%-70% of customers across 17 companies abandon silently. In one study, 71.3% of abandoning customers did so silently, reducing agent efficiency by 3.2% and system capacity by 15.3%, incurring $5,457 in annual costs per agent. We develop an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to estimate customer patience under uncertainty and identify influencing covariates. We find that companies should use classification models to estimate abandonment scope and our EM algorithm to assess patience. We suggest strategies to operationally mitigate the impact of silent abandonment by predicting suspected silent-abandonment behavior or changing service design. Specifically, we show that while allowing customers to write while waiting in the queue creates a missing data challenge, it also significantly increases patience and reduces service time, leading to reduced abandonment and lower staffing requirements.

Silent Abandonment in Contact Centers: Estimating Customer Patience from Uncertain Data

In the quest to improve services, companies offer customers the opportunity to interact with agents through contact centers, where the communication is mainly text-based. This has become one of the favorite channels of communication with companies in recent years. However, contact centers face operational challenges, since the measurement of common proxies for customer experience, such as knowledge of whether customers have abandoned the queue and their willingness to wait for service (patience), are subject to information uncertainty. We focus this research on the impact of a main source of such uncertainty: silent abandonment by customers. These customers leave the system while waiting for a reply to their inquiry, but give no indication of doing so, such as closing the mobile app of the interaction. As a result, the system is unaware that they have left and waste agent time and capacity until this fact is realized. In this paper, we show that 30%-67% of the abandoning customers abandon the system silently, and that such customer behavior reduces system efficiency by 5%-15%. To do so, we develop methodologies to identify silent-abandonment customers in two types of contact centers: chat and messaging systems. We first use text analysis and an SVM model to estimate the actual abandonment level. We then use a parametric estimator and develop an expectation-maximization algorithm to estimate customer patience accurately, as customer patience is an important parameter for fitting queueing models to the data. We show how accounting for silent abandonment in a queueing model improves dramatically the estimation accuracy of key measures of performance. Finally, we suggest strategies to operationally cope with the phenomenon of silent abandonment.