2024 KPI for Customer Service: First Response Time

Replying to a customer after a day or two is a thing of the past. 

These days, it’s all about customer service representatives replying to customer queries as quickly as possible, to help boost customer satisfaction. With a faster first response time, companies can prove to customers their readiness to help and the effectiveness of their customer support team. Responding to a customer ticket quickly also prevents customers from closing an existing chat and starting a new one in the hopes of getting noticed more quickly. 

In our 2024 Key Performance Indicators for Customer Service ebook, we found that the best companies tend to respond to customer tickets within two minutes. How does your team compare to this standard? Obviously, factors such as a ticket’s complexity, proper staffing, customer support hours, customer service channel used, and others play a part in your support rep’s ability to respond faster. 

Read on as we tell you more about first response time and share some useful tips on how to improve your first response time. 

What is First Response Time? 

First Response Time (FRT) is the time it takes for a customer to receive the first response from an agent after they have submitted a ticket (not counting any automated responses). FRT is often the best indication of efficiency and adequate staffing. It’s also commonly called First Reply Time.

Benchmarks 

After gathering 300 data points from more than 150 different sources and combining them, we were able to come up with the benchmarks of the best, average, median, and worst for first response time. 

Consider these tips to improve First Response Time 

Expand your coverage. 

Typically, FRT is high because a large proportion of customers contact a company outside of business hours, like during the weekend or the evening. Even if you don’t count off-hours in your FRT calculation, these tickets lead to large backups when the next day begins. In these cases, expanding your coverage, even by just a few hours, can have the largest impact. 

Perfect your schedule. 

Coverage and scheduling are a big part of keeping FRT low. Larger teams typically use Workforce Management (WFM) software to optimize their schedules, but smaller teams can use a queueing model, which can calculate an optimal schedule based on your desired KPIs, your ticket volume, and the typical timing of incoming tickets. This is most useful for teams that handle chat and phone. 

Create separate queues for VIPs. 

Depending on your product, you may have certain customers who spend more. By creating a separate queue, you can ensure you deliver the rapid response times they expect as VIP customers. At Peak Support, when we implemented a VIP queue for a client, we reduced the first response time for this group to an average of 1 hour.

Help your team specialize. 

As your tickets grow in complexity, you’ll want to introduce specialization. This is becoming even more relevant as conversational AI chatbots now often handle a large portion of common, more general requests. Specialization enables better routing of the tickets that remain. By implementing specialized roles dedicated to triaging urgent issues and certain topics, AIHR went from helping 17% to 33% of customers in under 30 minutes.

A BPO can help you get a better First Response Time

Peak Support is an award-winning business process outsourcing company that has been helping brands – of all sizes and from various industries – by providing their customers with excellent after-sales service and support since 2015. Our team members in the US, Philippines, Colombia, and Europe are always ready to delight your customers with wonderful experiences that is respectful, thoughtful, and empathetic.

You can learn more about the different services we offer and how we can help you elevate your customer support by contacting us today. Our sales team will be ready to answer any and all questions you may have.