Senior Writer: Paras Kela
Reading Time: 8 MinutesPublished : September 30, 2023Do you want to gauge your support team’s efficiency and ensure the highest customer satisfaction? If yes, you must track this one key call center metric – average handle time.
Monitoring AHT in a call center helps you improve customer service and experience, making you a customer-centric business. That definitely gives you an edge, as customer-centric businesses have 60% more profitability than those that aren’t.
To help you realize this profitability, we have curated this guide on what is AHT in a call center, including the average handle time definition, its calculation, reasons to use it, and the factors affecting it. We have also covered the best practices to improve your AHT in a call center. Let’s get started!
Offering quick resolutions to customers is great, but balancing speed and customer service quality is equally important. An efficient and scalable call center software can help you achieve both. Upon successful implementation, it promotes agent efficiency, aids AHT optimization, builds customer trust, fosters lasting customer relationships, and helps you gain a competitive edge.
What is AHT (Average Handle Time)?
Average Handle Time (AHT) in a call center refers to the total time your call center agents take to solve a customer’s query. AHT is a popularly analyzed KPI in call centers via call center software to quantify a call center’s efficiency, customer satisfaction, and agent performance. This metric encompasses the entire customer interaction journey, which means AHT includes:
- Customer’s interaction with call menus – VR, automated greetings, or auto attendants
- On-hold time while agents review customer data – call routing, transfer, and forwarding
- Talking time with agents
- Follow-up tasks – scheduling appointments or callbacks, conducting follow-up calls, and post-call work
So, that was AHT meaning in call center, now let’s see how you can calculate it.
How to Calculate Average Call Handling Time?
Calculating the average handle time is easy if you follow the right steps and calculate accurately using the AHT formula. Here’s the step-by-step process of AHT calculation –
Step 1: The Average Handle Time (AHT) calculation starts with choosing the time period you’d like to measure the AHT for. For this example, we’re calculating it on a daily basis.
Step 2: Moving forward, add the three key figures for the pre-defined period – total talk time, total hold time, and total after-call work time.
Assuming the daily total talk time is 1500 minutes, the total daily hold time is 2200 minutes, and the total post-call work is 3000 minutes. This brings our total to 6700 minutes.
Step 3: Once you have your sum, divide it by the total number of customer conversations or calls during the specified period.
Assuming the total number of daily customer conversations is 250. Now let’s put the figures in the AHT formula –
Average Handling Time: (Total interaction period (6700)) / (Total number of daily conversations (250)) = 26.8 minutes
So, the AHT per call is 26.8 minutes per call.
Why Use Average Handle Time?
Contact center AHT is critical to improving customer experience, but AHT does a lot more than that. Here are some reasons you must use AHT in a call center–
1. Align with Customer Expectations
52% of customers expect a quick resolution; the high adoption of chatbots and live chat proves that. So, when customers have to interact with the support team for long, they form a negative perception of the business.
Measuring the average handle time alerts you regarding the length of interactions, ensuring the company aligns well with the expectations and goals.
2. Measure Returns on Your Operational Expenses
High operational expenses and high AHT means you’re at a loss.
Evaluate your contact center’s operational expenses, including agent costs–benefits and salaries. If your AHT in call center and operational expenses are high, all your expenses might not be worth it.
In that case, develop strategies to increase agent efficiency, reduce AHT, and consequently boost profit.
3. Spot Internal Bottleneck
One of the best ways to ensure quick query resolution is to ensure a seamless interdepartmental data flow. If that’s not the case with your contact center, evaluating contact center AHT can help you spot and eventually improve this bottleneck.
This may also highlight that your high AHT is not due to the agent’s inefficiency but a lack of workflow automation and cross-functional collaboration.
4. Check and Improve the Quality of Existing Resources
When you analyze your contact center AHT, you may find that resolving incoming queries for a specific product takes longer than others. This may mean your available resources for a specific product are unsatisfactory.
Based on this data, you can add relevant resources, pay attention to customer success training, and simplify messaging to lower the query number.
What is a Good Average Handle Time?
A good average handle time is around six minutes per contact or call. However, you must remember that AHT is subjective to a business and that a high degree sometimes signals holistic customer support.
Identify the standard AHT for your call center based on the following points –
1. Business Size
Startups and small businesses have less number of call center agents, increasing the AHT. Likewise, as local or new businesses with a small customer base, they have more time to invest in detailed and personalized customer service, increasing AHT.
In contrast, large enterprises with more available customer service reps and contact center software with call center automation to fulfill a high volume of customer queries often have a low AHT.
2. Industry
The AHT differs for different industries, products, and services. For instance, software applications need more long, technical, and extensive customer support with more follow-up, increasing AHT. While placing a food order will be simple and straightforward, lowering AHT.
3. Customer Service and Support Strategy
Your customer service and support strategy greatly impact AHT. Often, call centers with omnichannel and automated self-service – Interactive Voice Response and chatbots experience lower AHT than those who offer phone call support.
Also, if your customer service is standard and fast, you’d have a low AHT. In contrast, if your customer service is more personalized, AHT will be high.
4. Call Center Analytics
Upon analysis of important call center metrics, if you find that all your metrics are good and contributing positively to your business, then a high AHT doesn’t mean poor customer experience, support quality, and agent performance. If they look unsatisfactory and your AHT is high, then you need to pay attention.
You May Also Read : Call Center Analytics: A Complete Guide
Factors that Affect AHT
High AHT may indicate low agent efficiency, compromised customer experience, and declining productivity, all of which are detrimental to your business’ overall health.
To avoid this, you must know the factors that affect AHT so you can work on improving them. That’s exactly what we’ll discuss here –
1. Hold Time
The higher the hold time, the longer will be your average handle time.
Hold time refers to the average time customers wait in a queue to connect with a call center agent or the time your agent takes to come on the line to resolve a customer’s query.
For instance, if your agents do not have the adequate information or experience to solve the issue, they might put customers on hold for long, increasing AHT.
2. Multiple Calls
If your customers have to call multiple times to resolve their issues, your AHT will be high. This may happen if your call center is inefficient or your product is complex with high support requirements.
3. Frequency of Call Transfer
Call transfers are bound to increase your AHT. If your agents gather critical details and frequently transfer incoming customer query calls to other departments after putting customers on hold, you must pay attention. This process takes considerable time, increasing the AHT.
You May Also Read : What is ACD (Automatic Call Distribution)?
4. Repeated Questions
Repeated questions are a result of call transfer. How?
Because the agents who first receive the call ask customers questions before transferring it. Moving forward, the agent to whom the call was transferred asks those questions again to conceptualize the issue, increasing AHT and customer frustration.
To avoid this and make sure the second agent is aware of the call’s context, leverage the warm transfer feature of call center software.
5. Efficiency of After-Call Work
After-call work (ACW) refers to the tasks the agent performs post-customer call, like creating notes. If your agents use this time to complete personal tasks, your AHT will differ, as ACW is a part of AHT.
6. Call Abandonment
Do your agents often cut calls or transfer them to a different department? This may be due to the lack of resources or experience to achieve the goal of the customer call, increasing the AHT and lowering the quality of customer experience.
You May Also Read : What is Call Abandonment Rate & How to Calculate It?
Best Practices to Reduce Average Handle Time
Now that you are aware of the factors affecting AHT, you can easily gauge if those are true for your call center. If yes, you must lower it to improve customer satisfaction and agent efficiency. Here are some ways to reduce AHT –
1. Extend Agent Training
Providing specialized training–based on specific inquiries, products or customer segments and inherent skills to newly onboarded agents is pivotal to optimizing customer experience (CX) and keeping AHT low.
2. Give Self-Service Options
With self-service like a help center blog and internal knowledge base, customers can conveniently access required information, reducing AHT. Also, this is a win-win for agents as they don’t have to drain time on answering simple and repetitive questions. It also helps new agents still on their journey learn about the product and company.
3. Record Agent-Customer Calls
Make sure managers and agents with low AHT listen to recorded phone calls to analyze them, discover reasons for long calls, and gauge the degree of adherence to call center best practices. Based on this information, they can easily help other agents deliver better customer experience. (Discover the top 10 call recording software.)
4. Monitor Live Calls
Supervisors must listen to and monitor active calls to better gauge agent performance and extend help if needed. They may utilize features like barge-in to take over active calls or whisper to guide agents in real time.
5. Automate Call Center Processes
The call transfer time might be a significant reason for your high AHT. You can try introducing robust tools like Interactive Voice Response that customers can utilize to get their answers without connecting to an agent. Don’t forget to add answers to common questions like business hours to your IVR to eliminate quick calls from AHT and enhance CX.
6. Adopt the Right Software
The best call center software can keep your AHT within limits. Let’s dive deep into how its capabilities reduce your AHT –
1. Integrates data: Agents require all customer data–account history and past interactions in one place for easy access and deliver personalized CX.
2. Reports and analytics: Such software are designed to let you set agent performance standards, track agent performance, and develop strategies to enhance CX.
3. Omnichannel support: Call center software lets agents manage data across different communication platforms in one place without the need to toggle between tabs.
4. Real-time collaboration: This software offers a workspace where agents can work together to find solutions to complex customer issues instantly.
Wrapping Up
After carefully reading this extensive yet actionable guide, we hope you have developed a deep understanding of the average handle time (AHT) meaning in call center. You can calculate yours by following the process described in the above section and see if it matches the good AHT standards. Doing so will help you meet customer expectations, spot inefficiencies in the contact center, and boost the support team’s efficiency.
You can improve your AHT by following the best practices described above. Or even better, adopt robust call center software to automate certain call center tasks, improve agent efficiency, and reduce AHT. Get going!
Frequently Asked Questions
Suppose your total talk time is 1000 minutes, total hold minutes is 500, post-call work time is 500 minutes, and the total number of calls received is 200. So, your AHT would be (1000+500+500)/200. Your AHT would come to 10 minutes.
Some major causes of high AHT are ineffective automation, customer sentiment toward the company, inadequate agent knowledge, and technical mishaps.
Average handling time is the period between customer call initiation and call ending. In contrast, average talk time is the time the agent invests in talking to a customer.
Some challenges of AHT management are root cause identification for high AHT, inconsistent call volumes, and lack of experience or knowledge among agents.
Paras Kela is an accomplished IT professional with 7+ years of industry experience, including 4+ years as a dedicated content writer. His expertise lies in crafting informative blogs on VoIP and cloud telephony, among other technical subjects. Outside his professional pursuits, he cherishes quality time with loved ones, indulges in watching documentaries, and finds solace in gardening.
Updated : March 1, 2024
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