Average Resolution Time (ART)

What is Average Resolution Time?

Average Resolution Time, or ART, is the average length of time it takes for your customer support staff to resolve customer complaints. It’s a simple metric, found by dividing the total of resolution times in a period by the number of tickets solved in the same period.

An ideal ART will differ across industries, but the cross-industry average appears to be 24 hours. Ideal ART will also differ by channels, as follows:

• Self-service: instant
• Phone: 3 to 7 minutes
• Live chat: 10 minutes
• Social media chat: 10 minutes
• Social media comments: 24 hours
• Email: 24 hours

ART is an important KPI for your customer support team to monitor.

Why Average Resolution Time is key for support teams

As with other, similar KPIs, Average Resolution Time is important because it can help reveal the efficacy of your customer support staff. Furthermore, while there are several metrics to measure ‘resolution’ under different contexts, ART gives a general overview of them all.

If your ART is too high, it can point to deficiencies in your customer support. Knowing the acceptable benchmark for your Average Response Time and being able to consistently apply it is not only a winning formula for your customer satisfaction, but also a means of ensuring that you’re able to provide your support team help and resources if needed.

Calculating Average Resolution Time

How to decrease Average Resolution Time

The best way to decrease your Average Resolution Time is to ensure you have enough customer support agents to match your company’s needs, and that your agents are properly trained. A too-high ART likely indicates that either or both of these criteria are not being met. If this is the case, you’ll need to invest more training and/or resources into your support team to raise the level of service.

Consider investing in an AI chatbot, as this automated service can give customers immediate information without the need to direct their queries to a human agent, thus saving your support team time and energy to focus on complex cases.

Finally, as with other support-related KPIs, it’s important to strike a balance between speed and efficiency of customer service, and the quality of such service. While ART is certainly important for evaluating the level of your customer support, it’s not everything! Evaluate this KPI in the context of others such as CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) and FRT (First Response Time).

Other KPIs similar to Hit Rate include:

• Average Reply Time
• First Response Time
• Customer Satisfaction