Calls Offered vs Answered vs Abandoned in VICIdial

Almost every inbound number in VICIdial traces back to three counts: calls offered, calls answered, and calls abandoned. Once you know what each one means and how they connect, the rest of the inbound reports stop feeling like a wall of figures. Here's each one in plain terms, plus the simple math that turns them into your abandon rate.

Calls offered

Total calls offered is the total number of calls taken by the in-group, in other words every inbound call that reached the queue during your date range. An Ingroup is the queue a call lands in, so offered is your denominator: the full set of calls the queue had a chance to handle. Everything else is a slice of this number.

Calls answered

Total calls answered is the count of offered calls that an agent actually picked up. The gap between offered and answered is the part of your volume that did not reach a person. The report also tracks how many distinct agents answered calls to the in-group, which helps you tell a real staffing picture from one or two agents carrying everything. Answered calls are the ones that go on to accrue Talk time and then Wrap-up time.

Calls abandoned

Total calls abandoned is the count of calls that ended in the queue, where the termination reason was abandon. In other words the caller hung up while waiting, before any agent reached them. Each of these is an Abandoned call, and the report also gives you the average time a caller waited before abandoning, which tells you how much patience your callers had.

How abandon rate is derived

The abandon percent is simply calls abandoned divided by calls offered, expressed as a percentage. So if 1,000 calls were offered and 50 abandoned, your abandon percent is 5 percent. That single figure is your headline Abandonment rate, and it's the number most teams report up the chain. Because it uses offered as the denominator, a busy day with more offered calls can absorb more abandons and still look healthy on a percentage basis. That's worth remembering when you compare a quiet morning against a heavy afternoon, since the same raw number of drops can be a small percentage on one and a worrying one on the other.

Because the average wait before an abandon is reported too, you also learn whether callers are giving up quickly or hanging on for a long time before they quit. Quick abandons often point to a routing or greeting problem; long ones usually point to plain understaffing. Reading the two together tells you which lever to pull.

flowchart TD
  A[Calls offered] --> B{Reached an agent}
  B -->|Yes| C[Calls answered]
  B -->|No| D[Calls abandoned]
  D --> E[Abandon percent]
  A --> E
  E --> F[Abandoned divided by offered]

How the three counts relate

Offered is the whole; answered and abandoned are the two big pieces it splits into. If answered plus abandoned doesn't quite equal offered, the remainder is usually calls still routing or handled some other way, but for day-to-day reading you can treat the two as the main outcomes. To see how the wait before these outcomes is measured, read what queue time means on inbound calls. The full report family is laid out in the VICIdial reports guide.

Get these three counts straight and every other inbound metric falls into place. If you want a managed VICIdial box that's reporting these numbers in under a minute, see VICIfast pricing.