Average Handle Time (AHT) is the bread and butter of customer-facing teams. Your sales team tries to close deals; your support team works to resolve customer inquiries; your customer success team renews customers. For all these teams, understanding how long it takes to handle conversations is integral to moving the needle on your company's success.
After all, by tracking the team's average handle time trends, you understand if it's taking them more or less time to get to those closing, renewing, and supporting goals. The less time it takes, the more successful your company will be.
What is Average Handle Time?
Average Handle Time is the average amount of time it takes your team to complete a conversation. The timer starts when the call is answered and includes any holds, transfers, and conversation time on a phone call. Over email or chat, it's the amount of time it takes from when a team member first opens a conversation to when they resolve it. It includes the time it takes for a team member to do research, troubleshoot, and write up responses to the inquiry. The formula to calculate average handle time is: Total talk time + Total hold time + Follow up time
For written communications, like email, there is also average resolution time, which refers to the average amount of time it takes for a support agent to resolve a conversation. Average handle time is just how long it takes for a single response to be handled, rather than the overarching conversation itself.
Why is Average Handle Time Important?
Average Handle Time (AHT) is essential to businesses because it can serve as a leading indicator for many critical business metrics. AHT also gives you a measurable way to understand if initiatives you have implemented within your support organization are making any impact. For instance, if you create new documentation or turn on in-app onboarding within your product, you could also reasonably expect that it may help to lower AHT. After all, your agents would have less typing if they have documentation to send a customer's way.
Keep an eye on average handle time to understand how your team is performing, predict changes in metrics like customer happiness or effort score, and understand the impacts of new initiatives on your customers.
What are the Major Factors Contributing to an Increase in AHT?
If you notice that your average handle time is starting to creep up, a few different things might be the culprit. While it could just be that your customer service representative is still learning the ropes, some practices can slow down even your most seasoned reps. If your team's AHT is starting to get higher, and you haven't just hired a ton of new employees, check out the following to see if they might be causing the issue:
-
Lack of omnichannel contact routing. If it takes a long time for your tickets to get to the best representative to resolve them, then your AHT may suffer. For instance, if billing emails first go into your main ticket pool, rather than being automatically routed to your billing team, this may necessitate a longer handle time. The best solution for this is to create an omnichannel strategy by delivering a consistent communication journey for each customer.
-
Long call scripts. How much are you asking your support agents to say when they talk with a customer? Cutting out inefficient or unnecessary parts of your call script may help cut down AHT.
-
Unstructured scripts. Dealing with ambiguity can sometimes be tricky, especially over the phone. If you leave a lot of unstructured areas in your call scripts, it can lead to confusion and agents asking for unnecessary information.
-
Dead air. When your agents are on the phone, how often are they going silent to type in information or try to get an answer from the documentation? Ensure that your team members know where to find information ahead of time to make the most of their time on calls.
-
Hold time. Like the above, try to find more efficient ways to get information besides putting customers on hold. Empower your support agents with quick and easy ways to get answers and do things like offer refunds or returns.
-
Search time on systems. If your internal or external documentation is hard to search, that will take a toll on your AHT. After all, if your support team needs to spend a ton of extra time searching an inefficiently organized site, that takes away from their ability to respond quickly.
-
Repetition of queries. Imagine receiving the same inquiry multiple times, maybe even from the same customer. It can start to feel tedious and uninspiring. If you notice tons of tickets coming in about similar topics, consider making saved replies that your team can use to answer them quickly and efficiently.
-
Repeat calls and redundant information. Build a system that prompts your users for information before getting on the phone or email with your team. Ask for critical contact information, account details, or details about the issue using an automated system, and it will make things much easier for your team.
-
Repeated validations. Do you force your customers to validate their identity more than once during a support inquiry? If so, stop. Find a way to validate using a single piece of information that will allow their validation to carry through for any tasks they need to complete during the conversation. For instance, if you ask for their first and last name but know that you'll need the final four of their social security number for account-based validation later, just ask for the last four upfront.
-
Call abandonment. Call abandonment is very similar to cart abandonment when a customer abandons the cart when shopping for an item. According to a recent cart abandonment study by Privy you can get them back to buy the item using the right tactics and software. In call abandonment a caller hangs up before they ever get connected to a live person, this can lead to extended AHT because the support representative then needs to reconnect with the customer or call them back. One of the best ways to get the caller back on the line is to use automated callback software or a virtual queue. That way, you won't tempt customers to hang up just because they're in for a long wait time.
-
After Call Work (ACW) efficiency. Do you ask your support agents to write up tons of notes after each call and manually enter them into your CRM? Inefficient requirements with ACW can lead to a higher average handle time. Automate as much as you can between your help desk software and your CRM to boost ACW efficiency and lower AHT.
-
Time-wasting routines. Consider the practices and processes that you require your team to follow. For instance, when processing a refund, what are the hoops that you ask your team to jump through? Could anything be eliminated or made more manageable? When you notice AHT climb higher, one of the first places to look is these forced routines that slow down your team's ability to respond.
Benefits of Improved Average Handle Time
Improved average handle time is a massive boost to your business and your customers' loyalty. The quicker you can resolve their issues, the more time they have to utilize and master your product. When you empower your customers to do work, you increase loyalty and the stickiness of your product. If someone has to spend hours with your support team getting a resolution before actually taking action within your product, it may take them much longer to do what they were seeking help with.
Beyond that, improved AHT helps to improve your operational performance and reduce costs. The faster your team members resolve conversations, the faster they can move on to the next. With increased efficiency, you can staff fewer people to handle a higher number of cases. Beyond that, you also free your team up to work on other projects, such as improving documentation, implementing chat AI, or rebuilding your contact forms for maximum efficiency. Not having to hire additional team members to accomplish this out of the queue work is a massive boon to your bottom line.
How to Improve/Reduce AHT
So, maybe you've noticed that your average handle time is starting to climb higher. Or, perhaps you've keyed into the fact that your current average handle time should be lower—this can become increasingly noticeable as you start to correlate other metrics like customer satisfaction to AHT.
The good news is that there are tons of ways that companies can improve and reduce their average handle time:
-
Identify the root cause impacting AHT - There are tons of reasons why your AHT might be getting higher. Take a look through the list above and see if you can identify the root cause. Before changing anything in your support strategy, it's always best to be super clear about what is causing the issue. Otherwise, you may make tons of inefficient changes that end up not having any impact on the metric you are trying to shift.
-
Enable ongoing customer service agent coaching - Many companies perceive customer service as a cost center, but that's not the case. When you have efficient customer service and provide excellent experiences for your customers, they'll keep coming back. That increase in your customer's loyalty also boosts their lifetime value and willingness to continue purchasing your product. Spend energy and budget on ongoing coaching for your customer service agents. The better they get at their job, the more efficiently they handle conversations with your customers.
-
Step up new agents' call center training - You should never toss a new agent into the call center pool or ticket queue without adequately training them first. That is a surefire way to get inflated handle times as your agents put customers on hold to search through documentation or ask one of their colleagues for answers. By setting your agents up for success with excellent training, you empower them to feel confident in their role, and you help them be even better for customers calling in with issues.
-
Ensure employees know the product - Just as you train employees when they are first coming onboard to your support team, you should continue to enact ongoing training for any new features or product changes.Your product team trains up sales to best speak to the new features coming out, and they should spend time educating your support agents on what types of questions might come up, too. This training saves your agents' energy and time when on the phone with a customer and instills confidence in your customer that they are in the best hands.
-
Focus on building a comprehensive knowledge base - Nothing is worse than looking for an answer and not finding one. Devote at least part of your support team's time to creating documentation about common questions and issues. Not only will this help your support team if they have to look for an answer, but it also means that you may end up deflecting some conversations from customers as well. Many customers would prefer to find an answer themselves rather than speak to a support agent or wait for support responses. Every time you write a new doc about a common issue, you boost your customers' chances of finding answers for themselves.
-
Implement IVR and auto-attendants to save time - IVR is one of the best ways to get information and properly route calls before your customers get through to your agents. IVR allows you to ask customers about what they need help with and validate customer identities efficiently so your team members don't have to. Empower your team with the information they need to get to the bottom of the problem quickly, rather than needing to ask for tons of extra information that you could have gathered while the customer was waiting for their turn in line.
-
Provide reps with scripts for FAQs - If you know that your customers commonly ask specific questions, consider writing a script or a saved response to address them. That way, as soon as your customer uses a particular word or phrase, your support agents know that they can lean on the script or send along the saved reply, and the customer will get a quick, efficient, and helpful answer. This is particularly useful for basic questions or FAQs. Be careful with how many scripts and saved replies your team members are using, though, as sometimes they can feel impersonal, and the customer will feel unheard.
-
Keep customers greetings short and simple - your support agents don't need to greet every customer like an old friend. Encourage your reps to find greetings that feel true to their style but still feel professional and efficient.
-
Assess call types - different calls will require different responses and perhaps different agent experiences. For instance, if a customer calls in about a billing inquiry, this may require a different reaction than someone trying to return a product or just asking for product information. Ensure that you use a phone tree, IVR, or separate phone lines so that the support agent answering your calls knows that they are equipped to handle the type of issue coming through.
-
Optimize call routing Call - routing should feel effortless and painless to your customers and should make the lives of your support agents better. Make it easy for your customers to categorize what type of issue they are calling in about. Keep options short, sweet, and quick, with no more than 4 or 5 to select between each time. The longer the list, the more potential for confusion and your customer to be bounced around between teams unnecessarily.
-
Offer omnichannel support - according to a helpdesk software study by Helpscout: 75% of customers desire a consistent experience, regardless of how they engage a company (through social media, in person, by phone, etc.). Omnichannel support makes it super easy for customers to pick up conversations that they were having with your support team. If they were talking to a support agent over chat and then decide they'd rather talk on the phone, it's easy for you to transfer them without needing to call in again and provide the same contextual information. In that way, omnichannel support saves time for your customers and your support teams. When your support agent doesn't need to spend tons of time creating additional context about a customer's issue, they can get right into solving the problem.
-
Improve internal communication - the more context that your team has in a conversation, the better. Create ways for teams to share information so that the people responding to inquiries don't get caught out. For instance, if your sales team has spoken to a customer and knows that they care a lot about a specific feature, have them note that on the customer's contact record. Then, when your support team speaks to that customer, they have this custom knowledge and can use it in their response. This keeps your responses personal, reduces team members' time spent on discovery, and lowers your AHT. A great example of this is a shared inbox in customer service software which allows teams to see the entire history of all the previous conversations with each customer as well as ways to ask for help from other team members.
-
Record and review inbound and outbound calls - you can only coach on the things that you know. The more attention you pay to how calls are going, the better. If you notice that a call had a significantly longer handle time than expected, take the time to review. You might see some inefficiencies that you wouldn't have caught otherwise. Consider implementing a QA program that requires team members and managers to review randomly assigned calls. QA helps support agents learn about how other team members handle inquiries and creates an open feedback loop within the team.
-
Monitor agent performance - you can track AHT for your overall team, for individual types of calls, or individual agents. While all of these can indicate different shifts that need to occur, monitoring your individual agents' performance can be a valuable way of understanding separate levers that you can pull to enhance AHT. For instance, if you notice that one of your team members has a very high AHT in comparison to your other support agents, it may mean that you could be working more closely with that agent to coach them towards improvement.
-
Tweak your support strategy based on the analytics - It's best to make changes to your strategy based on quantifiable, measurable metrics. AHT is a great benchmark to use for improvement. Whenever you make changes to your support strategy, such as adding additional documentation, implementing in-app onboarding, or creating a new high-touch implementation strategy, keep an eye on how it affects AHT. If you notice that AHT is starting to rise in conjunction with a change that you have made, evaluate what might have shifted and how you could shift it back. For example, if you introduce a new refund process and notice that AHT goes up when you do, you may want to evaluate why. Did you add additional steps to the process? Does it take longer for the refund to be confirmed? Noting these shifts can help assess where you can make changes to AHT.
-
Streamline processes and improve your workflows - the more steps you have to a process, the higher your average handle time will jump. According to a new study my Monday.com a workflow reduces manual work for 74% for all businesses in United States. Another major benefit is that you can free up to 30% of your employees time by automating and streamlining your workflows according to a workflow study by Coupler. Consider creating a quarterly evaluation period to dig through all of your operations and note where you could change or update them. This is particularly helpful if you build your customer service strategy on the fly. When teams put new processes in place as a stop-gap or fix a temporary issue and never go back to revisit them, it's a surefire way to end up with tons of inefficiencies and high AHT.
-
Automate tedious, time-consuming tasks - automation is a keyword for many companies when considering changes to their strategy. As you go through coaching with your team members, ask them if they could automate any manual areas of their day-to-day. Some great examples of this are:
*Notes on conversations
*Updating CRM records after a call has occurred
*Routing conversations
*Validating identities
*Adding tags for organization purposes
-
Ensure customer information is always up-to-date - nothing slows down a conversation more than when a support team member has to verify or double-check information. Similarly, nothing is more embarrassing than making incorrect assumptions about a customer's issues based on inaccurate or out-of-date notes in their contact record. It takes time to reassess what the issue is and to apologize for having incorrect information in the first place. If you can, automate contact record updates as soon as a conversation is closed. Automation may mean just logging the exchange to your CRM or something as advanced as using AI to add contextual notes and tags right on the conversation itself. Find the areas that you can automate and do so!
-
Encourage active listening - things will go quicker when your team is engaged. Rather than just waiting for the customer to get to the point, train your team to engage in active listening. Active listening means paying attention actively no matter what the customer is discussing—there's always an opportunity to pick up on context clues. The sooner your support agent understands the real crux of the issue, the faster you can get to a resolution. If your team ends up having to back and ask questions that a customer has already answered, it's a waste of time for both parties.
-
Reduce ACW time After-call work - (ACW) refers to any follow-up activity that the team member has to do after a closed conversation. That could be logging a bug, adding notes to the CRM or conversation, creating tags, or adding specific codes for internal tracking. ACW can get factored in AHT, and if all of the work is manual, it can boost your numbers relatively high. Find ways to reduce the time it takes for ACW to get done, perhaps through automation or perhaps by cutting out specific tasks from the ACW timeline. Maybe bug logging, for instance, could wait until a midday break? Identify things that need to happen right away, and cut out any extraneous work to save for another time.
Attention to Detail Lowers Average Handle Time
The closer attention your team pays to your customers and the small moves in AHT within your support strategy, the quicker you will be to lower this all-important metric. As soon as you notice AHT starting to creep up, implement some processes to identify which part of your support efforts contribute. For instance: did you just hire a few new representatives? Implement a new support process for refunds? The sooner you can make shifts, whether to individual support agents' work or your team's efforts as a whole, the sooner you will see an impact on your key metrics.