Customer support can be a tough job, but the building blocks of meeting your customer's expectations are actually quite straightforward. Inquiries to your team must be resolved in an accurate and helpful way, and the faster you respond, the better.
There's a lot to pay attention to when looking at your ticket stats, but first reply time (FRT) is high up there. FRT is a key metric that helps your business understand the responsiveness of your customer support agents. In fact, Zendesk's data team has found that decreasing FRT correlates with an increasing customer satisfaction rating, making lower FRT a crucial goal for any business.
While FRT naturally fluctuates based on ticket volume, proactive strategies can minimize response times even during peak periods. This article gives you some tips for lowering FRT in different Zendesk channels.
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Lowering first reply time for email tickets
In Zendesk Support, 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.
When you see that FRT start to rise, take notice, and take advantage of some of these tips to help bring it back down:
- Self-service: When your customers help themselves, you don't need to worry about FRT. Not sure how to start? Keep track of your top issues, and write articles based on those making sure that agents are well trained and refreshed on those articles. Many customers now go online to serve themselves, and you should do your best to meet them there. Build up your help center, and make sure your agents are active there to quickly answer questions from your community.
- 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 Zendesk 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. At Zendesk, when we have a new product launch, we like to bring in the responsible product team and developers to help out.
- Look at your support hours: Do you know when you get most of your tickets? A quick look at the Explore Tickets created by hour report on the Tickets tab of the Zendesk Support dashboard can help you make sure that you have support online and ready to go when your customers are. If you're thinking about making the jump to round-the-clock support, see the What is the follow-the-sun model? Advantages + strategy white paper.
- Real-time support: Even if you're super fast at answering tickets, you can't beat live channels like messaging, chat, and phone calls. How cool would it be to have a median FRT under a minute?
- 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. We use problem and incident ticket types extensively (here are some views and triggers we've set up to keep track of them) so that we can get back to affected customers as fast as possible and let them know when we've resolved an issue. It's a great and easy way for your agents to get an early jump on these tickets.
For more information about measuring Support ticket first reply time in Explore, see the following resources:
Lowering first reply time for chat and messaging
Lowering first reply time for chat and messaging In real-time channels like chat and messaging, agent responsiveness is critical. In these channels, FRT is tracked in seconds and should be kept as low as possible.
Taking advantage of the features listed below can help you lower FRT for chat and messaging:
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Unrouted time: The following 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 (EAP). 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
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Agent reaction time: The following features help agents accept chats faster.
- Turn on auto accept (EAP). 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.
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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: