A guide to average handle time (AHT) and how to calculate it

Why average handling time matters for your business

When it comes to customer service metrics and call center KPIs that measure team efficiency, no metric does a better job than average handle time (AHT).

A high average handle time signals critical red flags that need to be attended to immediately. This includes warnings about process inefficiencies, and the quality of the training you offer, the ease of access to information and resources, and more.

So, it’s essential to monitor your average handle time to ensure it stays low.

To help you do that, in this blog, we discuss everything you need to know about average handle time – the meaning, the importance, and simple yet effective tips to reduce your average handle time.

What is average handle time (AHT)?

Average handle time or AHT denotes the average time an agent takes to handle a customer’s issue.

In addition to the actual time spent on the conversation, AHT also includes the hold time, call transfer time, and, more often than not, the time spent on completing tasks that need to be done after interacting with the customer, like updating ticket properties, sending CSAT forms, etc.

The average handle time is generally measured as a KPI in call centres. However, this metric also calculates the time spent interacting with customers through tickets, emails, and chats.

What is a good average handle time?

The benchmark for a good average handle time differs from industry to industry and varies across businesses within an industry based on the customer queries a business receives (basic, straightforward questions vs complex, time-consuming questions). 

For instance, if you’re an e-commerce company that sells headphones, your chances of getting issues that can be dealt with quickly are higher. These issues can include order tracking, refund, billing, and replacement requests, which only require short conversations and easy after-the-call work.

On the other hand, if you’re a retailer selling washing machines, the length of conversations can be longer, and the nature of queries is more complex. 

Keeping that in mind, here are a few benchmark AHTs across different industries:

Why is average handle time important? 

Average handle time, or AHT, is crucial to customer service and call center operations. Knowing your average handle time provides valuable insights into the efficiency and effectiveness of service representatives and the overall customer experience. Read on to learn more about how knowing your average handle time can improve customer service operations across your organization.

Efficiency of operations

AHT directly indicates operational efficiency in a call center. A lower AHT suggests that customer issues are resolved quickly, which can translate to lower operational costs. Efficient handling of calls allows a call center to manage a higher volume without compromising service quality. However, it's essential to find a balance to ensure that the speed of service does not negatively impact customer satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction

AHT is also a significant factor in customer satisfaction. Customers generally prefer their issues to be resolved promptly and efficiently. A shorter AHT can lead to a better customer experience as long as the quality of service is maintained. On the other hand, a very low AHT might indicate that calls are being rushed, which can lead to unresolved issues and a decline in customer satisfaction.

Resource allocation and planning

Understanding AHT helps better resource allocation and workforce planning. Managers can predict call volumes and duration by analyzing AHT data. This data enables managers to staff appropriately to meet the needs of their customers. This planning ensures enough agents can handle peak times without excessive idle times during slower periods.

Performance benchmarking

Average handle time is a benchmark for individual and team performance within a call center. It helps identify training needs and areas where process improvements can be made. For example, if certain agents have a higher AHT, they might need additional training or support to handle calls more effectively.

Identifying process improvement areas

A consistent analysis of AHT can reveal underlying issues in the call-handling process. Long AHTs might indicate complex customer issues, inadequate agent training, or inefficiencies in the support tools and processes. Identifying these areas allows for targeted improvements, such as enhanced training, process optimization, or technology upgrades.

Balancing quality and quantity

AHT helps strike a balance between the quality and quantity of customer interactions. While handling a large volume of calls is crucial, maintaining each interaction's quality is equally important. AHT provides a measurable way to manage this balance and ensure that service quality is not sacrificed in the pursuit of efficiency.

Why is it important to maintain a low average handle time?

A low average handle time can positively impact customer satisfaction, internal processes, and business growth. 

Here’s a closer look at how reducing your AHT can benefit your business:

Increase in CSAT: For customers, getting fast and accurate solutions without being put on hold or transferred around is the ideal customer service experience. Naturally, reducing your handling time will increase customer satisfaction, which will reflect well on your CSAT score.

Improvement in efficiency: To maintain a low average handle time, you must streamline processes and introduce features that increase agent productivity. As a result, your team will amp up their efficiency.

Reduction in costs: With your support set-up running like a well-oiled machine, your team can resolve more customer issues quickly. This increase in team capacity without an increase in team size can help you cut your hiring and staffing costs.

It’s important to remember that reducing your AHT should not come at the expense of customer experience. Businesses that successfully maintain a low AHT focus on optimizing internal processes instead of rushing through customer conversations or delivering subpar experiences.

How to calculate average handle time

Average handle time is calculated by taking the total duration of the customer interactions, total hold time, total transfer time, and the total time spent on activities after the conversation, the sum of which is divided by the total number of calls.

Average handle time formula

In the case of emails and tickets, you can total the time spent conversing with the customer with the wait times during the back and forth, the time spent on wrapping up the email/ticket, and divide that by the total number of emails/tickets received. 

For chat, you can follow the same formula as email. 

An easy way to calculate AHT

Calculating AHT can be a tedious process. Logging time on tickets requires manual effort and time that could otherwise be spent on helping customers.

To simplify things, you can check if your customer service software offers in-built AHT reporting. This way, you can automate the process of tracking time and get accurate AHT readings. For instance, Freshworks automatically tracks the time spent on each ticket and provides AHT reports in a single click.

In cases where multiple agents worked on the same ticket, you get a detailed view of the time spent by each agent. Plus, admins can access the AHT report to plan better.

How to reduce your average handle time?

The first step to lowering average handle time is understanding the reason (or reasons) causing handling times to increase. 

These reasons can vary from poor product knowledge to inefficiencies in internal processes and can go up to more significant business decisions, such as investing in the wrong support tools. 

Here’s a table that highlights the reasons that could be bogging your team down and thus increasing your average handle time.

AHT analysis: 15 common reasons that lead to a high average handle time

Once you’ve identified what’s wrong, you can work on taking corrective measures to reduce your average handling time. We’ve compiled a few tried and tested tips to help you do that. 

The worst way to reduce average handle time

Reducing average handle time (AHT) is a good goal for customer service teams seeking to improve efficiency. However, focusing solely on decreasing AHT without considering the impact on customer experience (CX) can have detrimental effects. There are several approaches to reducing AHT that can ultimately harm customer satisfaction, loyalty, and a company's reputation. Let's explore the worst ways to reduce AHT and why they should be avoided.

Prioritizing speed over quality

One of the worst approaches is prioritizing speed over the quality of service. Agents under pressure to keep calls short may rush through customer interactions without fully understanding or resolving the customer's issue. This approach can lead to unresolved problems, repeat calls, and lower customer satisfaction and loyalty. Customers value thorough solutions over quick, unsatisfactory interactions.

Implementing strict time limits on calls

Setting strict time limits for each call can pressure agents to wrap up interactions as quickly as possible without fully resolving the customer's issue. This practice can discourage agents from taking the necessary time to provide comprehensive solutions, leading to a poor customer service experience and potentially higher churn rates.

Discouraging personalized service

In efforts to reduce AHT, some organizations might discourage personalized service, encouraging agents to stick to scripts and avoid engaging in any additional conversation. Relying too heavily on scripts can make interactions feel impersonal and transactional, diminishing the customer's sense of value and connection with the brand.

Neglecting training on complex issues

As digital self-service channels handle basic inquiries, customer service calls are increasingly on complex matters. Neglecting to train agents on handling these complex problems can result in longer handling times and decreased customer satisfaction. Proper training ensures agents can resolve issues effectively.

Failing to utilize customer feedback

Ignoring customer feedback to reduce AHT is a big mistake. Feedback provides valuable insights into areas for improvement in both service delivery and issue resolution. Not leveraging this feedback can hurt a business. Organizations miss the opportunity to enhance their service strategies and potentially reduce AHT through more effective means, such as process improvements or enhanced training.

Overemphasis on AHT in performance metrics

Overemphasizing AHT in agent performance metrics can lead to a culture where quick resolutions matter more than meaningful interactions. It's crucial to balance AHT with other metrics like customer satisfaction (CSAT) and first call resolution (FCR) to ensure a comprehensive evaluation of agent performance that aligns with providing exceptional customer service.

8 tips to improve your average handling time

1. Improve agent training  

If your team is unable to communicate effectively or if agents are scampering for answers, you need to up your customer service training game. Here are a few ways in which you can increase your team’s knowledge and help them upskill:

– Create self-paced courses: Whether it’s for product training or soft-skills training, creating a self-paced course with videos and interactive quizzes is a great way to enable your team to learn and upskill at their convenience. The best part about a self-paced course is that agents can come back and brush up their knowledge occasionally, as and when required.

– Learn from demanding customers: Your customers are your best teachers. They truly test your skills and can offer great learning in return. Listening to challenging customer conversations as a periodic group activity can tell you what you’re doing wrong, illuminate changing expectations, and prepare you for future expeditions.

– Roleplay customer conversations: Practice makes perfect, so put your new agents through many mock customer conversations. Use these conversations to test your team’s product knowledge, pressure handling and communication skills, and offer constructive feedback accordingly. Encourage agents to take turns volunteering as customers to understand things from their perspective.

Don’t forget that training is not a one-time activity. You must continuously train and retrain your team each time there is a product or process update. You can even have biweekly or monthly sessions where your team gets together and shares what they have learned.

2. Invest in the best support tools

Your team needs to have access to the best-in-class customer support tools in order to seamlessly deliver customer service. 

If you’re offering customer service on different channels using different tools, you’re inviting delays and inefficiencies that negatively impact your average handling time.

Invest in an omnichannel customer service software that gives you view conversations across all channels instead of a standalone helpdesk with limited capabilities. Offering customer service across all channels right from a single screen can reduce the time agents spend juggling between tools. 

With omnichannel software like Freshworks, agents can view the timeline of events that tells you all the conversations you’ve had with a customer across all channels. This gives agents all the information and context they need to engage in a conversation without scurrying around for context. So your team can jump right into offering a solution and thus reduce the length of the customer.

Pro tip: Don’t neglect hardware – your support agents need access to good-quality headsets, laptops, routers, and monitors to do their work without any hassles.

3. Deflect repetitive questions 

Repetitive questions take up a sizable number of questions your team receives and can not only be a waste of agent time, but they can also get boring and annoying to deal with. 

Instead of spending time typing out messages each time, your team can tackle these questions more efficiently using: 

i) Canned responses: For commonly reported problems that came in, agents can save answers and messages and attach them while replying in a single click.

ii) Solution articles: Besides using canned responses, agents can use FAQs and how-to guides from their knowledge base to quickly handle repetitive questions.

iii) Call/chat scripts: When used rightly, customer service scripts can help agents take the conversation forward faster, especially with complex, repetitive queries. 

For example, in industries that emphasise compliance, such as e-commerce or healthcare, agents need to ask a particular set of questions to retrieve the required information before offering a solution. Having scripts with lists of questions/talking points that need to be discussed can help close the conversation sooner. 

iv) Ticket templates: Ticket templates help expedite filling out a new ticket form or email. You can pre-fill information like subject, description, and ticket properties and reduce the time spent on ticket creation.

You can also deploy customer-facing self-service options such as a knowledge base portal or an AI-enabled chatbot to offer answers to common tickets. Doing this helps reduce the number of tickets your team has to deal with. Plus, most customers prefer to find answers independently before contacting support. So, with the right resources, customers might be able to solve some of the issues they are facing and have shorter conversations with your team. A good trouble ticketing software is a solution to track the detection, reporting, and solving of tickets raised by customers. Still, it will also offer solutions for setting up self-service, collaborating with context, and robust reporting and analytics.  

4. Improve access to information 

One of the main reasons that increases the resolution time is that agents don’t have access to the complete information needed to resolve the issue immediately. While resolving a customer’s issue:

– 33% of an agent’s time is spent on understanding the nature of the inquiry and,

– 25% in pulling relevant customer information1

On the other side of the spectrum, 36% of customers feel that the most frustrating aspect of a poor customer service experience is an agent who lacks the knowledge or ability to solve the customer’s issue.2

Here are a few things you can invest in to improve accessibility to information:

i) Internal knowledge base: An internal knowledge base is a content repository that contains up-to-date information about your product, service, and company policies. Publishing can improve your internal knowledge management by leaps and bounds, enabling agents to find the right resource at the right time. You can also integrate your internal knowledge base with artificial intelligence that recommends the best resource based on the customer’s issue. (More on this later.)

ii) Context-rich customer service software: As we discussed earlier, a tool like Freshworks offers context about the customer’s previous interactions irrespective of the communication channel. So, with context-rich support software, agents do not need to spend time gathering more details about the customer’s issue; they can offer the right solutions faster. 

iii) Integrations with other applications: Sometimes, agents need data from external sources like your CRM, billing, and order management software to resolve specific issues. By seamlessly integrating your customer service software with other essential applications that you use, you can enable your agents to find data quickly without having to switch between apps.

5. Enable seamless collaboration 

Collaboration within and across teams is a crucial part of resolving some customer complaints. 

Quite often, collaborating with a colleague is time-consuming since agents need to set the context of the issue, follow up constantly, and deal with a lot of back and forth. 

The best way to streamline collaboration is to use the collaboration tool baked into your customer service software. This ensures that the agent and the person (or people) roped in can gather the context of the customer’s issue by browsing through the conversation history, and can thus get into resolving the issue right away. 

Suppose your customer service tool does not come with a collaboration feature. In that case, you can integrate it with your internal collaboration or communication software so both parties can communicate swiftly.

Parent-child ticketing is another way to deal with complex customer issues that require multiple teams to work together. This collaboration method involves breaking down larger requests into multiple smaller parts and getting all the collaborators to work on their respective tasks in parallel. 

Parent-child ticketing improves agent productivity and significantly reduces resolution times.

6. Use agent-facing AI and automation

Agent-facing AI and automation are the nuts and bolts of boosting agent productivity. 

Customer service leaders worldwide have realized the importance of AI and automation, and 72% are increasing investments.  

Here are the benefits of using these time-saving solutions:

Agent-facing AI such as Freddy-AI-powered agent-assist bots can play the role of your agents’ assistant by – fetching information from third-party applications – assisting agents with troubleshooting customer issues – enabling agents to execute automated workflows for complex backed procedures in a single click – offering intelligent recommendations for solution articles and canned responses that can be attached to an agent’s reply.

7. Regularly review and update scripts and guidelines

To ensure that customer service representatives are providing quick and consistent responses, companies can take specific actions to keep their scripts and guidelines effective:

• Conduct Frequent Script Audits: Regularly evaluate your scripts to ensure they align with current products, services, and policies. Update your scripts to reflect changes in offerings or procedures.

• Gather Agent Feedback: Agents are on the front lines and can provide valuable insights into what customers are asking and which parts of the script are most effective. Use their feedback to make necessary adjustments.

• Incorporate Customer Feedback: Analyze customer surveys and feedback to identify areas where scripts could be improved for clarity, tone, and helpfulness.

• Test Script Changes: Before fully implementing a new script, test it with a small group of agents and measure its impact on handle time and customer satisfaction to ensure it's effective.

• Train Agents on Updates: Whenever scripts are updated, provide training sessions to ensure all agents understand the changes and how to apply them during interactions.

8. Enhance agent empowerment and decision- making

Empowering agents to make more autonomous decisions can streamline the resolution process and improve customer satisfaction. Here are ways companies can achieve this:

• Define Clear Parameters: Establish clear guidelines for the independent decisions agents can make, such as specific discount limits or scenarios where a fee can be waived.

• Provide Comprehensive Training: Ensure agents are well-trained on your products and services and problem-solving and decision-making frameworks that support autonomy.

• Implement a Support Structure: While empowering agents, provide support for more complex scenarios, including easy access to supervisors or subject matter experts when needed.

• Encourage Ownership: Foster a culture where agents feel responsible for and capable of resolving customer issues, encouraging them to take ownership of calls from start to finish.

• Monitor and Feedback: Use performance metrics to monitor the effects of empowerment on handling times and customer satisfaction. Provide regular feedback to agents on their decision-making, celebrating successes and offering improvement guidance.

Automation can boost agent productivity by removing the need to perform a task or a set of tasks manually. Two types of automation can help lower your AHT:

i) Scenario automation or macros enable agents to perform multiple functions with a single click. For instance, to deal with bug reports, by executing a scenario, agents can email the customer, update the ticket type to ‘bugs and performance issues’, and mark the ticket as ‘pending on the engineering team’ in one shot.

ii) Workflow automation helps you automate repetitive manual workflows that you need to perform while resolving an issue, such as following up with colleagues you need inputs, reminders for finishing up pending work and checking on customers. 

With the repetitive tasks out of the way, agents have more time and mind space to take on more tickets and finish them faster.

What’s the difference between average handling time vs average call duration?

Average Handling Time (AHT) and Average Call Duration (ACD) measure different aspects of service interactions. AHT encompasses the total time spent on customer interaction, including the conversation time and any tasks the agent performs before, during, or after the call, such as documentation or follow-up actions. 

Average Call Duration refers to the length of the actual conversation between the agent and the customer, excluding any additional tasks or activities. While ACD focuses solely on talk time, AHT provides a more comprehensive view of the time investment required for each customer interaction, making it a broader measure of efficiency and workload.

What shouldn’t be included in average handling time (AHT)?

Average Handling Time (AHT) should only measure the efficiency and effectiveness of customer interactions, focusing on the duration from when the customer is connected to an advisor to when the interaction concludes, including any after-call work directly related to the customer's issue. 

Activities unrelated to direct customer service, such as bathroom breaks, special projects, team meetings, and other administrative tasks, should not be included in AHT calculations. These non-customer-facing activities fall under the category of shrinkage, which accounts for the time agents are unavailable to handle customer calls. 

Including these activities in AHT can distort the metric and create an inaccurate reflection of actual customer interaction times that potentially misleads in assessing the performance of customer service operations.

Enhance your average handling time effortlessly with Freshworks Customer Service Suite

Your average handle time is a true reflection of how efficient your team is and is thus a vital metric in call centers and contact centers.  

Focussing on reducing your AHT instantly improves customer satisfaction, and agent productivity. 

With Freshworks, you can calculate AHT automatically, helping admins, supervisors, and agents get accurate reports without worrying about logging time. Freshworks’ powerful AI, smart automations, built-in collaboration, and an agent productivity-boosting feature bundle can help you reduce your AHT in no time.

Businesses that moved from other helpdesks to Freshworks saw a 55.4% reduction in their average handle time. Those who upgraded from a shared inbox recorded a 68% improvement in support efficiency.