First response time
First response time is how long a customer waits between sending their message and receiving your first reply.
How to measure it
Three choices change the number more than any improvement you make.
Does an automatic acknowledgement count? “Thanks, we have received your message” doesn’t answer anything. If you count it, your first response time drops to two seconds and tells you nothing. Count the first reply that deals with what they asked.
Business hours or real time? A message at 11pm answered at 9am is ten hours in real time and a few minutes in business hours. Only real time describes what the customer went through. Pick one, write it down, and keep it.
Average or median? A handful of messages that sat for two days pull the average up. The median shows what a typical customer waited. Track the median, and look at the slowest 10% separately, because that is where complaints come from.
What customers expect
Customers who message a business expect an answer within the hour, not the next working day. When the reply is slow, many stop waiting and buy from someone else. A business that answers only in office hours misses it for everything that arrives after 6pm and at weekends.
What it means in practice
First response time depends mostly on coverage, so process changes rarely fix it. The hours nobody is working are the ones that hurt it. One App Store review from a car detailing business describes the problem: enquiries arrive while the owner is out servicing customers, and almost all of them come on WhatsApp.
The levers are to cover the hours you are closed, to answer the questions that don’t need you, and to get the ones that do need you in front of a person faster. An automated first reply helps only if it is a real answer, such as the price, the next free slot or the order status. A holding message improves the metric and leaves the customer waiting.
Read it with other numbers
A fast first reply followed by four days of silence scores well on this metric. Read it next to resolution rate and CSAT to see whether customers got what they came for.
Related terms
Read next
- Average response time, and how to bring it down
- Customer service automation for aircon and home services
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