Question
Does the first reply time reply take into account business hours? Can I report on first reply time from 8 am to 6 pm, Monday to Friday?
Answer
The first reply time in Zendesk is calculated in calendar hours and business hours. Both results are stored with the ticket data.
To report on the first reply time within business hours, search for metrics that contain Business hours in their title, for example, First reply time - Business hours (min).
Business hours vary according to the parameters set in the schedule of your account. If your schedule accounts for work between Monday to Friday, from 8 am to 6 pm each day, then when reporting use metrics or attributes that explicitly say Business hours.
For more information about reporting on first reply time, see the article: Explore recipe: Reporting on first reply time.
22 comments
Rachel Johnsen
Hey there,
I set our agent schedules for 9am - 5:30pm, however, but I arrived there was no schedule set. When I pull data from before the schedule was set, will the new schedule apply to it?
For example: if I set the schedule in 2020, but pulled First Reply Times from 2019, would the schedule be applied to it after the fact?
Thanks for your help,
Rachel
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Chandra Robrock
Hi Rachel - Unfortunately, there wouldn't be way to retroactively report on response times based on business hours before the Schedule was setup in Zendesk. However, you can definitely report on 2019 response times based on calendar hours.
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Rachel Johnsen
Thank you Chandra!
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Ryan Belcher
I have seen a lot of articles mention the "First reply time - Business hours (min)." metric but I cannot seem to find that anywhere when creating a query. Has that been removed from the Explore tool?
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Dave Dyson
Hi Ryan,
You should be able to find that in the Support > Tickets dataset. If you start a new query, select the Supports > Tickets dataset, click to add a metric, enter "first reply" in the search box, and scroll down a bit, you should see it there:
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Anita Rajkumar
First reply time business hours does it excludes the non business hours replies ?
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Chandra Robrock
Anita Rajkumar Non-business hour replies would still be included. However, it would be calculated based on the number of business hours it took to reply.
For instance, let's say your business hours are set to M-F 9am-5pm.
If a ticket was created on Saturday at 3pm and responded to on Sunday, Zendesk would report a first reply time of 0 business hours.
However, if a ticket was created on Friday at 3pm and still responded to on Sunday, Zendesk would report a first reply time of 2 business hours (i.e. Friday from 3-5pm were considered within business hours).
Hope that helps!
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Dale Demerre
Why does First reply time not capture on an agent creating 'Proactive ticket' for a client? why do they still need to create a 1st reply for a ticket they created, shouldn't that be automatically expressed as a first reply? agents get a hit on 1st reply metric even if they made the ticket for a client.
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Venn Villanueva
Hi Dale Demerre, that's because the Zendesk first reply time metric measures the time between ticket creation from an end-user and the first public agent comment after that.
More information can be found here, How first reply time is calculated.
Hope this answers your question. Thanks!
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Daniel McMillen
How do I create a report similar to the default query "Efficiency: Tickets by first reply time brackets" but instead of showing the first reply time overall I would like to see the first reply time for my business hours? I have tried using the first reply time business hours filter but it seems to show averages etc as opposed to the percentage like the original query.
I would like to see a percentage of reply times based on my business hours like the report below. For example, in this image, the 8-24h and 24h+ filter is including tickets that have come in outside of operating hours.
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ervin jason
I set our agent schedules for 9am - 5:30pm, however, but I arrived there was no schedule set. When I pull data from before the schedule was set, will the new schedule apply to it?
For example: if I set the schedule in 2020, Alight Motion Mod Apk, video editing app support pulled First Reply Times from 2019, would the schedule be applied to it after the fact?
1
Gab Guinto
If you need to have FRT brackets that are measured in business hours, then you need to create a custom attribute similar to the default First reply time brackets. If you look at the formula of the default attribute –
– you'll see that it references the FRT metric in calendar hours. You can copy the formula, and replace these with the business hour metric for FRT.
You can use your custom attribute in your queries if you need the FRT brackets to be based on business hours.
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Gab Guinto
New schedules won't affect the historical data and won't be applied on older tickets. Ticket metrics like First reply time recorded on tickets won't be adjusted/changed when you create a new schedule - it will only apply on tickets and our ticket data moving forward.
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ervin jason
Hi Gab,
Thank you for clarifying it.
Okay. I understand.
Got it.
You lost me on this one. What does it mean? You said 'New schedules won't affect old tickets in any way, shape or form, that's how I understood it. Then you're saying it will apply on tickets and 'our ticket data'. This needs a bit of clarification.
Thanks
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Gab Guinto
Sorry if that wasn't clear. Yes, old tickets and the metrics that were already recorded on those tickets won't be affected. New schedules will only apply moving forward to newly submitted tickets, and to metrics that have yet to be recorded on ongoing conversations/tickets.
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ervin jason
This makes it much clearer. Thank you!
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Ronny John
I set our agent schedules for 9am - 5:30pm, however, but I arrived there was no schedule set. When I pull data from before the schedule was set, will the new schedule apply to it?
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Alex Zheng
Schedules will not apply retroactively so if the data is already set for example for first reply time then changing the schedule now will not after previous data.
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DaveH
Hi team, I work a lot with custom dashboards so I understand the individual ticket-created metrics but my question is about the First Reply times in the native Zendesk Support dash.
Are these calendar hours or business hours?
If it is business hours, what happens if a new instance is set up without a business schedule?
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Alex Zheng
The default dashboard utilizes calendar hours, if you want to use business hours you can make a clone of the dashboard and make the changes yourself!
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Allie
Hello! For clarification, if I have 3 different schedule for 3 time zones - does business hours account for all three? Or just the first one?
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Capcut templates
I had our agent schedules set for 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., but when I got there, it wasn't set up. Will the new schedule apply to the data I pull from before it was set? For instance, would the schedule be applied to it after the fact if I set the schedule in 2024 and Capcut Template video editing program support, removed First Reply Times from 2023?
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