Whether you are working in a support or help desk team: Crucial for your success and customer satisfaction is your quick reaction to problems. In technical terms: The First Response Time or First Reply Time to tickets. In order to calculate the response time, a report has to track the time of the customer request’s entry and the time of the first status change made by a customer support representative. After you’ve calculated your First Response Time, you will also be able to calculate your Average First Response Time as well as your Median First Response Time.
Time of first response – time of customer request = (# Minutes) First Response Time
First Response Time is calculated by simply subtracting the entry time of the customer request from the time of a status change.
To see more of a trend over time, the report calculates the Average First Response Time by dividing the sum of all First Response Times by the number of resolved tickets.
[45 + 70 + 62 + 80 + 58 + 113 + 65] / 7 = 63.3 Minutes Average First Response Time
Another helpful variation of this metric is Median First Response Time. To find the median, all the response times are arranged in numerical order and the middle number is selected. Using the same numbers from the previous example, the Median First Response Time would be 65 minutes. Calculating the median reduces the impact of outliers like the 113 minutes response time in this example.
[45, 58, 62, 65, 70, 80, 113] = 65 Minutes Median First Response Time
Once you’ve calculated your First Response Time, you could use it in your marketing campaigns as a USP.
The duration and quality of help are crucial for your customer’s first impression of your support team.
It’s critical to establish as fast as possible that a request matters and to communicate it.
The shorter your response time, the happier your customers will be.
If a customer doesn’t get a response quick enough, he will most likely switch channels to get your attention or even switch vendors.
The First Response Time only shows when a response has been delivered but doesn’t reflect if the customer was satisfied with the response. Be sure to track this metric along with Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) to maintain a holistic understanding of the customer experience.