While the retrial phenomenon plays an important role in communication networks and should not be ignored, retrial systems do not present an exact analytic solution, so approximate techniques are required. To the best of our knowledge, all the existing techniques are based on computing the steady states probabilities. We propose another approach based on the relative state values which appear in the Howard equations. The results of the numerical evaluation carried out show that this solution outperforms previous approaches in terms of both accuracy and computation time.