Today’s customer service teams are under immense pressure to deliver excellent service as quickly as possible. To determine whether customer service teams are meeting their service goals, it’s important to measure the average resolution time. Resolution time is the amount of time it takes for customer service teams to resolve customer inquiries. This metric is essential for customer service teams to track, as it can provide important insight into their performance and allow them to identify areas for improvement. In this blog post, we’ll explore the concept of average resolution time, discuss why it matters, and provide tips for improving it. By understanding resolution time and actively managing it, customer service teams can stay ahead and ensure customer satisfaction.
Median Resolution Time vs. Average Resolution Time
Why is it important?
You can determine if you can improve your customer service operations in the following ways by looking at the average resolution time:
Improve customer experience
You can learn crucial details about your customers’ experiences by monitoring your average resolution time. The customer will have a better experience with a quick resolution. Nevertheless, depending on how many issues a customer has, there may be multiple resolutions on a single ticket. The two types of resolution times are:
If a resolution takes a while, it might be because of a persistent problem with a product or marketing, which those departments can address to shorten the average resolution time. A lengthy Full Resolution time but a brief First Resolution time may indicate that there were several issues to be resolved, each of which was caused by an external problem.
Provide support to your team
Resolution times can help you gauge your team’s effectiveness. An employee may gain from additional training to help them advance their resolutions times until they are on par with their coworkers if they have a low individual resolution time for one representative. However, if the team as a whole resolves tickets quickly but there are still open tickets, the team may require additional assistance to handle the incoming tickets.
Evaluate your customer service policies
You can gauge the effectiveness of your customer service policies by looking at average resolution times. Your team’s resolution times may be longer than they need to be because they are adhering to internal or CRM procedures. If assessing the processes in place using the Average Resolution Time You can make minor adjustments to make them better and observe whether the Average Resolution time decreases. It can serve as a guide for you as you create a more effective procedure to help your clients.
What is the average resolution time?
Average resolution time is the length of time it takes a typical customer service agent to address a customer’s issue. This term is used by customer relationship management (CRM) software as a gauge of an e-commerce team’s productivity. The CRM logs customer requests, creates tickets, and assigns each ticket to a specific representative. The tickets help organize and track communications with each customer. The CRM can aggregate the time it takes the representative to fix the problem in communication with the customer into an average
Depending on whether their CRM compiles this data, other customer service teams, such as phone operators, can also use this metric. The equation for how to calculate average resolution time is:
Average resolution time = total resolution time for all resolved tickets / total resolved tickets.
How to calculate average resolution time
Your CRM system might figure out your typical resolution time for you if you have one. You can search your CRM system for details on how to access the metric. The steps below can be used to determine the average resolution time even if the metric isn’t saved in your CRM:
1. Determine a preferred range
Prior to calculating the average, you can choose the length of time for which you want to do so. However, you can only include the tickets since you made the change if you made a specific change to your processes and want to see how it affected resolution time. You can get an overview of how your team performs on a typical day by using a longer time frame.
2. Gather resolution times
You can collect precise information about each of your representatives’ resolution times in order to calculate the average. Keep track of every ticket that comes into your customer service department and how long it takes the agent to resolve it. Your CRM system might save this information for you. If you choose not to, you can request that your representatives keep their own records. Even though this data may not be as precise, it can still give you useful insights into the workings of your team.
3. Calculate total resolution time
Add the resolution times for each ticket to arrive at the total resolution time. The total amount of time your team has spent resolving customer tickets is the sum of these numbers. You can use the resolution total to find various averages and metrics that can guide the way your team is organized. You can learn how much time your team devotes to tickets in comparison to other tasks.
4. Divide by number of tickets solved
When you know how much time was spent on each ticket, divide it by the number of tickets that were resolved during that time. Have your team determine the number of tickets that were resolved within the allotted time. Next, calculate your average by dividing the total time spent by the total number of tickets resolved. Use this equation, for instance, if you resolved 100 tickets in a total of 10 hours, or 600 minutes, of ticket resolution time:
600/100 = 6
Meaning you have an Average Resolution Time of six minutes.
Best practices to reduce resolution time
Once you are aware of your average resolution time, you can create a strategy to decrease it and enhance your customers’ customer service experience. Here are some tips for reducing your resolution time:
Organize your tickets
Your representatives can more effectively respond to each inquiry quickly and accurately by categorizing the customer service tickets by priority, the complexity of the questions, and the subject. You can create a strategy to deal with the open tickets in your queue after creating your organizational system. For instance, tickets requiring outside assistance are handled first to give representatives enough time to hear back from customers and respond the same day. Secondly, representatives address new tickets, and lastly, outstanding tickets. Having a specific strategy can help your representatives stay organized, regardless of how you develop your system.
Automate tasks
Automate as many processes as you can to ensure the efficiency of your business. In order to save your representatives time, some smaller tasks, such as allocating tickets to specific departments or assigning them to representatives, can be automated. The variety of tasks you can automate may vary depending on the system you’re using, so make sure to research the features your CRM offers. To add more automation features, you can use plug-ins for automation.
Host training
Your team may be able to resolve tickets more quickly if they are well-versed in the company’s policies and prepared to handle tickets quickly. You can host a variety of customer service training sessions at your business to increase the team members’ resolution times. An essential skill a customer service representative can learn in training is how to defuse an irate customer, answer as many inquiries as possible in a single response, and build rapport.
Develop standard responses
For each new client, certain inquiries or problems come up repeatedly. Your customer service representatives may become more familiar with these queries as they handle more tickets and develop standard responses for them. Compile some of the most helpful responses to these frequently asked questions, and have them saved and formatted so that you can send them to any customers who ask them quickly and easily. If a typical query is, “What time does the store open?,” your representatives could have a standard response message that reads something like this:
We appreciate your interest and will be open at 10 a.m. tomorrow. m. on Mondays through Saturdays and is closed on Sundays. We close at 6 p. m. on Mondays through Fridays and at 4 p. m. on Saturdays. Please let me know if you have any more questions.
They can copy the standard response and send it instead of creating a new one each time a customer asks this question, saving time and guaranteeing that every customer receives the same accurate information.
FAQ
What is a good average resolution time?
Although the time to resolution may differ, the time to the initial response must be as brief as possible, lasting no more than a few minutes or an hour. According to a SiteBuilder study from the previous year, 21% of SaaS companies responded to support requests in under an hour. That’s a good benchmark.
What is expected resolution time?
A customer service metric called “Time to Resolution” tracks how long it takes, on average, for a customer interaction to be marked as “resolved.” Time To Resolution is sometimes referred to as Mean Time to Resolution or Time to Resolve and is shorthand for these terms: MTTR or TTR.
What is call resolution time?
A metric called “Call to Resolution” gauges the typical time it takes to address a customer’s issue. When a customer interaction (a call, chat, email, support ticket, etc.) begins, the clock begins to run. (and keeps going until the issue is fully resolved to the customer’s satisfaction.
How can I improve my resolution time?
- Minimize Waiting Time.
- Automate Repetitive Actions.
- Offer Self-service Options.
- Organize Tickets Based on Priority.
- Use SLAs to Avoid Breaches.
- Use Canned Actions.
- Route Tickets Intelligently.
- Collaborate on Tickets.
