Abandoned call
Abandoned call: A call that a customer answers but that reaches nobody, because the dialer opened more lines than there were free agents. Also called a silent call.
Definitions checked 4 September 2026.
Abandoned calls are a by-product of parallel dialing. When a predictive dialer opens several lines per agent and more people answer than expected, the surplus calls have nowhere to go: the customer says hello and hears nothing. From the business side it is an efficiency setting; from the customer side it is a stranger calling and saying nothing, which is why regulators in several markets cap the rate.
The damage is not only regulatory. Silent calls are among the strongest signals a caller-ID app can learn from, and a number associated with them starts being flagged, which reduces the answer rate for every subsequent call from that number, including the ones that would have been useful.
Any dialer that places one call per free caller produces none of these. That is true of power dialing generally and true by construction of SIM based dialers such as Telodial, because a single SIM cannot open a second line while the first is in use.