A logistics client came to us convinced they needed more agents. Their abandonment rate was 34%. We looked at the call flow before touching headcount, and most of that number was self-inflicted.
What we found
- A 22-second branded greeting before the first option.
- Six top-level options, in the order the org chart is drawn rather than the order callers need.
- Four levels of nesting to reach "where is my shipment" — the single most common reason for calling.
- No way to reach a human without traversing the whole tree.
- No indication of wait time in the queue.
The changes
Lead with the most common intent
Sixty-one percent of calls were shipment status. That became option one, reachable in eight seconds, and self-served entirely by the voice bot against the tracking API.
Cut the greeting to five seconds
Callers already know who they dialled. The brand message was moved to the hold loop, where there is time to fill anyway.
Never more than three options, never more than two levels
People cannot hold six options in working memory. If you genuinely have more, group them and let the second level disambiguate.
Always offer the escape hatch
Pressing 0 reaches a human from anywhere in the tree. Businesses resist this, fearing everyone will press 0. In practice around 12% do — and those are exactly the callers self-service was going to fail anyway.
Tell people how long they will wait
"Approximately four minutes" reduces abandonment more than shortening the wait to three minutes silently. Uncertainty is what makes people hang up.
Result
Abandonment fell from 34% to 9% over six weeks. Average handle time dropped 38% because agents stopped receiving calls the bot could resolve. They did not hire anyone.