When it comes to customer service metrics that measure team efficiency, no metric does a better job than average handle time.
A high average handle time highlights critical red signals that need to be tended to immediately. This includes warnings about process inefficiencies, the quality of the training you offer, the ease of access to information and resources, and more.
So it’s essential to keep your average handle time low, at all times.
To help you do that, in this blog, we discuss everything you need to know about average handle time – the meaning, the importance, and simple yet effective tips to reduce your average handle time.
What exactly does average handle time mean?
Average handle time or AHT is a customer service metric that denotes the average amount of time taken by an agent to handle a customer’s issue right from the beginning of the customer conversation to the last activity that is performed and until the case is closed.
In addition to the actual time spent on the conversation, AHT also includes the hold time, call transfer time, and more often than not, the time spent on completing tasks that need to be done after interacting with the customer like updating ticket properties, sending CSAT forms, etc.
The average handle time is generally measured as a KPI in call centers. However, this metric also is used to calculate the time spent interacting with customers through tickets, emails, and chats.
How is AHT calculated?
Average handle time is calculated by taking the total duration of the customer interactions, total hold time, total transfer time, and the total time spent on activities after conversation, the sum of which is divided by the total number of calls.
In the case of emails and tickets, you can total the time spent conversing with the customer with the wait times during the back and forth, the time spent on wrapping up the email/ticket; and divide that by the total number of emails/tickets received.
For chat, you can follow the same formula as email.
What is a good average handle time?
The benchmark for a good average handle time differs from industry to industry, and varies across businesses within an industry based on the customer queries a business receives (basic, straightforward question vs complex, time-consuming questions).
For instance, if you’re an e-commerce company that sells headphones, your chances of getting issues that can be dealt with quickly are higher. These issues can include order tracing, refund, billing, and replacement requests, all of which only require short conversations, and easy after-the-call work.
On the other hand, if you’re a retailer that sells washing machines, the length of conversations can be on the longer side, and the nature of queries, more complex.
Keeping that in mind, here are a few benchmark AHTs across different industries:
Why is it important to maintain a low average handle time?
A low average handle time can positively impact customer satisfaction, internal processes, and business growth.
Here’s a closer look at how reducing your AHT can benefit your business:
– Increase in CSAT: For customers, getting fast and accurate solutions without being put on hold or transferred around is the ideal customer service experience. Naturally, reducing your handling time will result in an increase in customer satisfaction, which will reflect well on your Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score.
– Improvement in efficiency: In order to maintain a low average handle time, you need to streamline processes and introduce features that increase agent productivity. As a result, your team will amp up their efficiency.
– Reduction in costs: With your support set-up running like a well-oiled machine, your team can resolve more customer issues in a shorter span of time. This increase in team capacity without an increase in team size can help you cut down on your hiring and staffing costs.
It’s important to remember that reducing your AHT should not come at the expense of customer experience. Businesses that are successful in maintaining a low AHT focus on optimizing internal processes as opposed to rushing through customer conversations or delivering subpar experiences.
How to reduce your average handle time
The first step to lowering average handle time is understanding the reason (or reasons) causing handling times to increase.
These reasons can vary from poor product knowledge, inefficiencies in internal processes, and can go up to more significant business decisions such as investing in the wrong support tools.
Here’s a table that highlights the reasons that could be bogging your team down and thus increasing your average handle time.
Once you’ve identified what’s wrong, you can work on taking corrective measures to reduce your average handling time. We’ve put together a few tried and tested tips that can help you do that.
6 practical tips to reduce your average handle time
#1 Improve the training you offer
If your team is unable to communicate effectively or if agents are scampering for answers, you need to up your customer service training game. Here are a few ways in which you can increase your team’s knowledge and help them upskill:
– Create self-paced courses: Whether it’s for product training or soft-skills training, creating a self-paced course with videos and interactive quizzes is a great way to enable your team to learn and upskill at their convenience. The best part about a self-paced course is that agents can come back, and brush up their knowledge from time to time, as and when required.
– Learn from demanding customers: Your customers are your best teachers — they truly test your skills and can offer great learnings in return. Listening to challenging customer conversations together as a periodic group activity can tell you what you’re doing wrong, shine some light on changing expectations, and prepare you for future expeditions.
– Roleplay customer conversations: Practice makes perfect, so put your new agents through a lot of mock customer conversations. Use these conversations to test your team’s product knowledge, pressure handling and communication skills, and offer constructive feedback accordingly. Encourage agents to take turns to volunteer as the customer to understand things from their perspective.
Don’t forget that training is not a one-time activity. You need to continuously train and retrain your team each time there is a product or process update. You can even have biweekly or monthly sessions where your team gets together and shares their learnings.
#2 Don’t compromise on the quality of your support tools
Your team needs to have access to the best-in-class customer support tools in order to seamlessly deliver customer service.
If you’re offering customer service on different channels using different tools, then you’re inviting delays and inefficiencies that negatively impact your average handling time.
Invest in an omnichannel customer service software that gives you view conversations across all channels instead of a standalone helpdesk with limited capabilities. Offering customer service across all channels right from a single screen can go a long way in reducing the time agents spend juggling between tools.
With an omnichannel software like Freshdesk, agents can view the timeline of events that tell you all the conversations you’ve had with a customer across all channels. This gives agents all the information and context they need to engage in a conversation without scurrying around for context. So your team can jump right into offering a solution and thus reduce the length of the customer.
Pro tip: Don’t neglect hardware – your support agents need to have access to good quality headsets, laptops, routers, and monitors to do their work without any hassles.
#3 Prevent time spent on repetitive questions
Repetitive questions take up a sizable number of questions your team receives, and can not only be a waste of agent time, they can get boring and annoying to deal with.
Instead of spending time typing out messages each time, your team can tackle these questions more efficiently using:
i) Canned responses: For commonly reported problems that came in, agents can save answers and messages and attach them while replying in a single click.
ii) Solution articles: In addition to using canned responses, agents can also use FAQs and how-to guides from your knowledge base to handle repetitive questions in less time.
iii) Call/chat scripts: When used rightly, customer service scripts can help agents take the conversation forward faster, especially the complex, repetitive queries.
For example, in industries that lay a lot of importance on compliance such as e-commerce or healthcare, agents need to ask a particular set of questions to retrieve the required information before offering a solution. Having scripts with lists of questions/talking points that need to be discussed can help close the conversation sooner.
iv) Ticket templates: Ticket templates help expedite the process of filling up a new ticket form or new email. You can pre-fill information like subject, description, and ticket properties and reduce the time spent on ticket creation.
You can also deploy customer-facing self-service options such as a knowledge base portal, or an AI-enabled chatbot and offer answers to common tickets. Doing this helps in reducing the number of tickets your team has to deal with. Plus, most customers prefer to find answers on their own before reaching out to support. So, with the right resources, customers might have been able to solve a part of the issue they are facing, and have shorter conversations with your team.
#4 Improve access to information
One of the main reasons that increase the resolution time is that agents don’t have access to the complete information needed to resolve the issue right away. In fact, while resolving a customer’s issue:
– 33% of an agent’s time is spent on understanding the nature of the inquiry and,
– 25% in pulling relevant customer information1
On the other side of the spectrum, 36% of customers feel that the most frustrating aspect of a poor customer service experience is an agent that lacks the knowledge or ability to solve the customer’s issue.2
Here are a few things you can invest in to improve accessibility to information:
i) Internal knowledge base: An internal knowledge base is a content repository that contains up-to-date information about your product, service, and company policies. Publishing one can improve your internal knowledge management by leaps and bounds by enabling agents to find the right resource at the right time. You can also integrate your internal knowledge base with artificial intelligence that recommends the best resource based on the customer’s issue. (More on this later.)
ii) Context-rich customer service software: As we discussed earlier, a tool like Freshdesk offers context about the customers’ previous interactions irrespective of the channel of communication. So with a context-rich support software, agents need not spend time trying to gather more details about the customer’s issue, they can offer the right solutions, faster.
iii) Integrations with other applications: Sometimes, to resolve specific issues, agents need data from external sources like your CRM, billing, and order management software. By seamlessly integrating your customer service software with other essential applications that you use, you can enable your agents to find data quickly without having to switch between apps.
#5 Enable seamless collaboration
Collaboration within and across teams is a crucial part of resolving some customer complaints.
Quite often, the process of collaborating with a colleague is a time-consuming one, since agents need to spend time setting context of the issue, follow up constantly, and deal with a lot of back and forth.
The best way to streamline collaboration is to use the collaboration tool that is baked into your customer service software. This ensures that the agent and the person (or people) roped in can gather context of the customer’s issue by browsing through the conversation history, and can thus get into resolving the issue right away.
Suppose your customer service tool does not come with a feature for collaboration. In that case, you can integrate it with your internal collaboration or communication software so both parties can communicate swiftly.
Parent-child ticketing is another way to deal with complex customer issues that require multiple teams to work together. This collaboration method involves breaking down larger requests into multiple smaller parts and getting all the collaborators to work on their respective tasks in parallel.
Parent-child ticketing improves agent productivity and significantly reduces resolution times.
#6 Invest in agent-facing AI and automation
Agent-facing AI and automation are the nuts and bolts of boosting agent productivity.
Customer service leaders worldwide have realized the importance of AI and automation, and 72% of them are increasing investments in the same.3
Here are the benefits of using these time-saving solutions:
Agent-facing AI such as Freddy-AI-powered agent-assist bots can play the role of your agents’ assistant by
– fetching information from third-party applications
– assisting agents with troubleshooting customer issues
– enabling agents to execute automated workflows for complex backed procedures in a single click
– offering intelligent recommendations for solution articles and canned responses that can be attached to an agent’s reply.
Automation can boost agent productivity by removing the need to manually perform a task or a set of tasks. Here are two types of automation that can help in lowering your AHT:
i) Scenario automation or macros enable agents to perform multiple functions with a single click. For instance, to deal with bug reports, by executing a scenario, agents can send an email to the customer, update the type of ticket to ‘bugs and performance issues’, and mark the ticket as ‘pending on engineering team’ in one shot.
ii) Workflow automations help you automate repetitive manual workflows that you need to perform while resolving an issue such as following up with colleagues you need inputs from, reminders for finishing up pending work, and checking on customers.
With the repetitive tasks out of the way, agents have more time and mind space to take on more tickets and finish them faster.
To sum up
Your average handle time is a true reflection of how efficient your team is, and is thus a vital metric in call centers and contact centers.
Focussing on reducing your AHT instantly improvement in customer satisfaction, and agent productivity.
Freshdesk, an omnichannel customer service software that comes with powerful AI, smart automations, in-built collaboration, and an agent productivity-boosting feature bundle can help you reduce your AHT in no time.
TRY FRESHDESK FOR FREE
P.S. – Businesses who moved from other helpdesks to Freshdesk saw a 55.4% reduction in their average handle time. Those who upgraded from a shared inbox recorded a 68% improvement in their support efficiency.
Source:
1 – https://freshdesk.com/customer-support/chatbots-improve-customer-experience-blog/
2 – https://biz30.timedoctor.com/call-center-statistics/
3 – https://www.freshworks.com/the-new-cx-mandate/
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