Contact center reachability

Contact Center Reachability measures how easily customers can successfully get in touch with your contact center when they attempt to make contact. It reflects the percentage of inbound contact attempts (calls or other channels) that are successfully handled, rather than blocked, abandoned, or unanswered.

Reachability is a critical indicator of accessibility, customer experience, and capacity planning. Poor reachability often results in frustrated customers, repeat contact attempts, higher abandonment rates, and reputational damage.

Definition Contact Center Reachability is a contact center KPI that measures the proportion of incoming contact attempts that successfully reach the contact center and are handled by the system, either by being answered by an agent or by being properly processed through self-service options.

Formula

Reachability (%) = [	Number of successfully handled inbound contacts	] * 100
	Total inbound contact attempts

• Successfully handled inbound contacts include calls answered by agents or resolved via IVR/self-service
• Total inbound contact attempts include all incoming calls, including blocked, busy, abandoned, or failed attempts

Why should you measure Contact Center Reachability?

Measuring reachability provides insight into how accessible and reliable your contact center is from a customer’s perspective.

1. Customer accessibility

• Ease of contact: Customers expect to reach your business without repeated attempts.
  
• Reduced frustration: Low reachability leads to busy signals, call failures, and abandoned attempts.
  
• Brand perception: Difficulty reaching support negatively impacts trust and brand reputation.
  

2. Demand and capacity visibility

• Hidden demand: Poor reachability often masks real call demand, as blocked or failed calls are not handled.
  
• Peak load awareness: Reachability highlights when your infrastructure or staffing cannot handle demand.
  
• Better forecasting: Understanding missed contact attempts improves volume forecasting accuracy.
  

3. Operational efficiency

• Infrastructure performance: Reachability reveals limitations in telephony capacity, trunking, or routing.
  
• Staffing alignment: Low reachability may signal understaffing or inefficient scheduling.
  
• Queue design: Helps evaluate whether queue limits or overflow rules are too restrictive.
  

4. Customer effort reduction

• Fewer repeat attempts: Customers who fail to reach you often call back multiple times.
  
• Lower abandonment risk: When customers can enter the queue successfully, they are more likely to wait.
  
• Improved journey consistency: High reachability supports a smoother customer journey.
  

5. SLA and regulatory compliance

• Accessibility requirements: Some industries have minimum accessibility or availability requirements.
  
• Contractual commitments: Reachability may be part of client-facing SLAs.
  

Audit readiness: Consistent tracking supports compliance reporting.

Improving Contact Center Reachability – an example scenario

A hypothetical company, ABC Utilities, experienced frequent customer complaints stating that “lines are always busy.” Despite acceptable ASA and handling times, customers reported difficulty getting through during peak hours.

Identified issues

• Limited trunk capacity: The telephony system could not handle peak inbound call volume.
  
• Queue caps: Calls were blocked once a queue length threshold was reached.
  
• Poor overflow handling: Calls were not redirected to alternative queues or self-service.
  
• Lack of visibility: Failed call attempts were not consistently reported or analyzed.
  

Changes implemented

1. Infrastructure optimization

• Increased inbound trunk capacity to handle higher simultaneous call volumes.
  
• Implemented automatic overflow routing when primary queues reached capacity.
  

2. Smarter queue management

• Removed rigid queue caps that caused unnecessary call blocking.
  
• Introduced virtual queuing and callback options during peak periods.
  

3. Expanded self-service

• Enhanced IVR flows to resolve common requests without agent involvement.
  
• Routed informational calls directly to automated services.
  

4. Monitoring and reporting

• Added reachability as a core KPI on real-time dashboards.
  
• Began tracking blocked, failed, and abandoned attempts separately.
  

Results

After one quarter, ABC Utilities saw measurable improvements:

• Reachability increase: From 82% to 96% of inbound attempts successfully handled
  
• Customer complaints: Reduced by 35% related to accessibility issues
  
• Repeat call attempts: Decreased by 28%
  
• Overall satisfaction: Improved due to reduced customer effort

Is Contact Center Reachability important for you?

The importance of reachability depends on your service model, customer expectations, and industry requirements.

Contact centers that should focus more on reachability

Customer service and support centers
Customers expect consistent access, especially for issue resolution or account-related inquiries.

Utilities and public services
High accessibility is essential during outages, billing periods, or emergencies.

Healthcare and emergency services
Inability to reach support can have serious consequences.

Financial services
Customers often contact these centers for time-sensitive or high-impact issues.

High-volume inbound environments
Reachability is essential to avoid hidden demand and customer churn.

Contact centers that may focus less on reachability

Outbound-focused centers
Inbound accessibility is less critical when most interactions are initiated by the center.

Low-volume or appointment-based services
Customers may tolerate limited access if alternative contact paths exist.

Internal support desks
Employee-facing desks often have more flexible accessibility expectations.

Improving Contact Center Reachability in 10 steps

1. Measure true demand

• Track all inbound attempts, including blocked and failed calls.
  
• Separate abandoned calls from unreachable attempts.
  

2. Review infrastructure capacity

• Assess trunk limits, concurrent session capacity, and system constraints.
  
• Ensure scalability during peak periods.
  

3. Optimize queue configuration

• Avoid overly restrictive queue caps.
  
• Implement overflow routing and backup queues.
  

4. Align staffing with demand

• Match agent availability with real inbound attempt volumes.
  
• Adjust schedules for peak access periods.
  

5. Introduce callback options

• Offer virtual queuing to reduce blocked and abandoned calls.
  
• Balance callback volume with live agent capacity.
  

6. Strengthen self-service

• Route simple, high-volume requests to IVR or automated flows.
  
• Keep self-service intuitive and reliable.
  

7. Monitor in real time

• Display reachability alongside ASA and abandonment rate.
  
• Act quickly when accessibility drops.
  

8. Analyze failure reasons

• Identify why customers cannot get through (busy signals, queue limits, routing errors).
  
• Address technical and process-related causes separately.
  

9. Forecast proactively

• Use historical reachability data to predict infrastructure and staffing needs.
  
• Plan for seasonal or event-driven spikes.
  

10. Review and refine continuously

• Treat reachability as a core CX KPI, not just a technical metric.
  
• Adjust strategies as customer behavior and channel mix evolve.

Conclusion

Contact Center Reachability is a fundamental KPI for understanding how accessible your contact center truly is. While metrics such as Average Speed of Answer focus on what happens after a customer enters the queue, reachability reveals whether customers can get through in the first place. By monitoring and improving reachability, contact centers can reduce customer effort, uncover hidden demand, and ensure that their infrastructure and staffing levels support a consistent and reliable customer experience.