Tips for lowering first reply time

There's a lot to pay attention to when looking at your ticket stats, but first reply time (FRT) is high up there, as a key metric that helps your business understand the responsiveness of your agents. Zendesk has found that decreasing FRT correlates with an increasing customer satisfaction rating, making lower FRT a crucial goal for any business.

First reply time (FRT) is calculated as the time between when a ticket was created to the time the first public comment from an agent is made on that ticket. If the ticket is solved without any public comment at all, and the ticket hasn't already been breached, that ticket doesn't contribute to your FRT metrics.

While FRT naturally fluctuates based on ticket volume, proactive strategies can minimize response times even during peak periods.

This article contains the following topics:

Lowering first reply time for email tickets

Lowering first reply time for chat and messaging

Related article:

Understanding ticket reply time

Lowering first reply time for email tickets

When you see that FRT start to rise, take notice. There are some actions you can take to lower FRT.

Take advantage of these features to help you lower FRT for email:

Self-service: When your customers help themselves, you don't need to worry about FRT. Keep track of your top issues, and write articles based on those so that your users can self-serve. Make sure that agents are well trained and refreshed on those articles.

Trend or outlier: Check your ticket volume when looking at changes to your first response. Have you had a big surge leading up to the increase in FRT? Start with the Tickets and Efficiency tabs of the Support dashboard in Explore. If you had a temporary surge from a new product launch or a major service incident, then this might not be a sign of a worrying trend. Even so, if you can predict these surges, that's a great time to bring a bit of extra help on board.

Look at your support hours: Look at the tickets created by hour report on the Tickets tab of the Support dashboard in Explore to understand when tickets are created. This can help you make sure that you have support online and ready to go when your customers are. If you're thinking about offering round-the-clock support, see Configuring a follow-the-sun model.

Real-time support: Even if you're super fast at answering tickets, you can't beat live channels such as messaging and voice. You might want to consider these channels, if you're not already using them.

Problems and incidents: When something goes wrong, it's critical to quickly identify and address emerging issues. Getting back to your customers quickly, letting them know you're aware and working on a problem, is key to turning something unfortunate into an opportunity to give them a positive experience interacting with your company. It's a good idea to use problem and incident ticket types so that we can get back to affected customers as fast as possible. To set up an effective workflow, see How to track problem and incident tickets.

For more information about measuring Support ticket first reply time in Explore, see the following resources:

Analyzing your Support ticket activity and agent performance

Explore recipe: Reporting on first reply time

Lowering first reply time for chat and messaging

Lowering first reply time (FRT) in real-time channels, such as chat and messaging, is critical. In these channels, FRT is tracked in seconds and should be kept as low as possible.

Take advantage of these features to help you lower FRT for chat and messaging:

Wait time: These features reduce the time customers spend waiting in the queue before a conversation gets assigned to an agent.

Update agent chat limits. This allows agents to serve more conversations at a time, which is helpful when a higher load is expected.

Configure a conversation inactivity timer. If you're using omnichannel routing for messaging, you can configure a short inactivity timer to release an agent’s bandwidth faster.

Set operating hours and business hours to control the inflow of the incoming ticket volume based on your support hours.

For chat: Setting up operating hours

For messaging: Setting your schedule with business hours and holidays

Agent reaction time: The following features help agents accept chats faster.

Turn on auto accept. Automatically assign the conversation to an agent with no explicit need to click on the Accept chat button.

Turn on hybrid assignment mode. If you use the assigned routing method, hybrid mode lets agents serve beyond their capacity on both chat and messaging channels.

Agent typing time: The following features help agents craft their messages to customers faster.

Create a macro for the first reply to reduce the time an agent spends typing in the composer.

Apply macros with a keyboard shortcut. Shortcuts help agents apply macros faster.

For chat: Using shortcuts in Chat

For messaging: Applying macros with a keyboard shortcut

Configure SLA policies for messaging channels to specify the response and resolution times that your support team aims to deliver to your customers based on ticket priority.

For more information about measuring chat and messaging first reply time in Explore, see the following resources.

Chat:

Analyzing your Chat activity

Explore recipe: Reporting on chat first reply time by brackets

Messaging:

Analyzing your messaging tickets

Explore recipe: Reporting on first reply time for messaging tickets

Metrics and attributes for Zendesk messaging