Why did first reply time increase (Essential and Team plans)?

Issue symptoms

Agents are seeing a major increase in first reply time (FRT) on the Reporting Overview.

Conditions

• The increase in FRT is on the Reporting Overview
• Support account is Essential or Team, or does not have access to Insights reporting.

Cause and resolution

Oftentimes FRT increases are a result of outlier tickets that had the first reply added at a time significantly later than a typical ticket in your Support account. This causes the FRT average to increase overall. Two of the more common causes of these outlier tickets are private comments and agent-created tickets:

Private comments: These cannot count as the first reply on a ticket. The first reply metric looks for the first public comment from an agent on a ticket. 

Agent-created tickets: These may also contribute to this "spike". Agent-created tickets are not excluded from this calculation and the first reply time is only calculated once there is another public agent reply after the ticket is created by an agent.

For more details, see Calculating first reply time.

Use the following steps to help locate specific tickets that have caused the increase or spike in your first reply time reporting in the Reporting Overview.

1. Select the Reporting menu in the sidebar, then on the Overview tab, click on First Reply Time.
2. Look for spikes in the first reply time and make note of the date(s).
3. Perform a search update for tickets on that date. For example: updated:2016-12-30. You can also used "solved" in place of "updated". For more details, refer to the Zendesk Support search reference. 
4. This will return a list of tickets updated in this date range. Compare the updated column to the requested column and look for tickets with a significant difference.
5. Select these tickets and compare the first end user comment to when the first public agent reply was added.
6. To check the actual first reply time of the ticket, use the Core API metrics endpoint in a browser: https://yoursubdomain.zendesk.com/api/v2/ticket_metrics.json.