What is average handle time?

No matter how much work you put into making your contact center experience as great as possible for customers, you don't want them to be communicating any longer than they need to. That makes your average handle time (AHT) one of the most important contact center key performance indicators (KPIs) you should measure.

Average handle time, or AHT, is the average duration of a customer's interaction with your contact or call center. This includes not only the time an agent spends working with the customer but also the on-hold time during the interaction and any after-call work the agent needs to complete once the customer completes the call.

To calculate your call center AHT, add the total talk time, hold time and follow-up time for all of your customer interactions and divide that number by the total number of customer interactions. You can do this across your call center or by individual agents to determine their efficiency.

Average handle time can have a significant impact on customer satisfaction. Understandably, it's most important that a customer walks away with their issue resolved. However, if you can resolve their issue in six minutes instead of 12 minutes you could have a happier customer.

In addition, call center AHT can correlate directly to your call center's efficiency. The lower your AHT, the more calls you can manage in a shift with the staff you have on hand. Seeking out ways to reduce call center AHT can help you improve your efficiency so you can meet demand without adding headcount.

Average handle time shouldn't be the only metric you track when it comes to measuring customer experience. For example, call center AHT typically doesn't include the time it takes to initially connect to an agent. If it takes an average of 50 minutes for a customer to reach an agent to have a five-minute call, that's an average of a 55-minute call from the customer's perspective, while your call center AHT will only measure it as five minutes.

Keep in mind that while customers want the call to be as short as possible, more importantly, they want their problem solved. A short call center AHT is no good if a customer has to call back multiple times before their issue is resolved. In this case, a longer average handle time that ends in a successful resolution on the first call would be superior to a shorter AHT.

As with any KPI, you have to be careful to improve the average handle time within the context of your overall call center strategy. For example, an investment in your knowledge base could help customers self-serve support, which would still leave agents to handle complicated and lengthy issues. This could lead to an increase in AHT, even though it could also mean lower call volumes, lower wait times and happier customers.

You can also measure the average handle time for channels like email and live chat, not just phones. By measuring AHT across each medium, you may uncover opportunities to shift customers to channels where you can deliver a lower AHT while maintaining a high level of satisfaction.

Different businesses will have different standards for call center AHT depending on the complexity of their customer interactions, making it difficult to provide a single benchmark. Instead, businesses may find it more valuable to measure their own baseline and seek to improve their AHT within the context of other KPIs like net promoter score, rather than aim to hit an arbitrary AHT number that doesn't reflect their business or customer satisfaction goals.

Once you've measured your baseline, here are a few ways your business can reduce its call center AHT:

Ensure your agents have all the training they need to answer questions effectively and efficiently. This means training them on your products, your business and your customer support software so they know where they need to go to solve an issue. Equally important is training agents on how to effectively manage a conversation so they and the customer don't go off-track with tangents.

Not all agents are created equal. Make sure you're routing the right calls to the right agents so customers get the help they need the first time instead of being transferred. Your interactive voice response system can help callers indicate who they need to talk to by allowing them to choose the reason for their call.