In this unique blog series we address customer abandonment. A major issue for companies globally, as it detrimentally affects potential profit gains.  Follow us as we analyze why it happens and more importantly, what you can do to stop it.

Customer abandonment is what happens when a customer is in your sales funnel, looking at the range of products or services available, and instead of proceeding with the purchase to check-out, they jump ship.

This occurrence is so prolific that measuring and addressing abandonment rates has become a bit of a science. Sales managers calculate the abandonment rate in a percentage of the number of customers that made a purchase versus the total number of unique customer interactions (be they calls, website visits, email exchanges etc). Most CRMs are configured to track these numbers.

Watch Video: How to Become a Ridiculously Successful Sales Manager

In many ways, it’s easy to understand why this happens, after all we’ve all been there before. For example, think of the last time you bought a new phone plan. You probably went on the company web site to look at plans available. Thinking back, consider the following questions:
1. Were all the phone plans clearly presented to you?
2. Did the plan you were interested in, have the necessary information to make an informed decision?
3. Was the process of purchasing on line easy to complete?
4. If you called a call center, were you answered quickly?
5. Was the agent able to answer your question?
If you answered in the negative to any of the questions, you may well have become an abandoning customer.

Undoubtedly customer expectations are high and difficult to meet, however studies show that customer abandonment rates are extremely high. Though there is discrepancy between industries, overall customer abandonment rates are at 76.9 percent. Finance has one of the highest rates at 82.9 percent, while retail fashion has one of the lowest at 67.6 percent[1].

Read More: Best Customer Engagement Methods: Industry Analysis 

Fortunately, there are a number of ways that companies can dramatically reduce customer abandonment levels and successfully achieve more sales conversions. Join CallVU in our next blog as we reveal some of these techniques.