Zendesk's "First Reply Time" metric on the Tickets data sets calculates the time from creation to the first public comment by an agent. However, if an agent merges a ticket (and does so with a public comment), Zendesk interprets that as the "First Reply" if it's the first public comment on the ticket. My organization has adjusted our Notify Requester of Comment Update trigger to skip email notifications when agents merge tickets this way (to avoid confusing emails to users), and also I wouldn't really consider this update/action a "Reply" to a customer's question. This renders the metric in Explore pretty much useless. Is there any chance Zendesk might consider omitting updates from the "Merge" update channel from the metric calculation to help? I know there are options to restrict merging to only private comments in settings, but that won't help with historical data in our Zendesk instance.

I have successfully built/created metrics and queries in the Ticket Updates data set using the DATE_FIRST_FIX function to get the first public reply via the Web form update channel, however these metrics are very slow to load and don't often cooperate with even simple filters/attributes, so they're not an ideal solution.