How To Calculate First Response Time and Improve Your FRT

Bad customer experience can be a death knell for a business. According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers report, 17% of customers will abandon your store after just one bad experience, and 59% after a few bad interactions. Exceptional customer service isn’t a luxury—it’s a requirement for survival and growth.

How quickly your company responds to a customer’s first question matters a lot, a value measured in first response time (FRT). A fast initial reply helps make customers happy and alleviates their concerns. Learn how to improve your FRT and optimize your customer service offerings.

What is first response time (FRT)?

First response time (FRT), sometimes referred to as first reply time, measures how long it takes for a human customer support agent to reply after a customer initiates contact by email, social media, live chat, or phone. FRT is measured in minutes, hours, or days. It works like this:

• The clock starts when a customer makes an inquiry or request.

• It stops when a real human leaves a personalized reply, acknowledging that their inquiry has been received and is being looked into.

• Automated responses and canned messages from AI agents typically do not count as a first response.

Why FRT matters for ecommerce customer service

FRT is one of the keys to customer success. Getting back to customers quickly shows you care. Here’s why you should keep track of how quickly you deliver customer responses:

• Resolves issues more quickly. Responding quickly means you can get the details to move toward a resolution sooner, and stop things from getting worse.

• Builds customer satisfaction. Nobody likes wait times—especially when they have an urgent question about a recent order or a product. A fast first response demonstrates a high level of attentiveness and respect that customers will notice and appreciate, even when things haven’t gone as planned.

• Reduces the risk of customers switching to a competitor. When you respond quickly, your actions show a commitment to customers’ needs, which gives them less reason to go elsewhere.

FRT and customer expectations

Online shoppers have varying expectations regarding the speed of replies, depending on how they contact you:

• Email. Nearly a third of customers expect businesses to respond to emails in one hour or less, though the average response time is 12 hours. 

• Social media. Customers reaching out via social media platforms expect responses within 24 hours, though under two hours is best. Failing to meet these expectations can do damage: 73% of consumers report they’d switch to a competitor if a brand doesn’t respond on social media.

• Live chat. Live chat and phone support are designed for immediate interaction. Customers expect support teams to respond in less than one minute.

How to calculate your first response time

1. Set rules
2. Determine the time of initial inquiry
3. Determine the time of first response
4. Calculate the difference

Understanding your current first response time is an important step toward improving customer satisfaction. Here’s how you calculate it:

1. Set rules

Before you can calculate first response time accurately and consistently, start with some simple rules:

• Have a system. Figure out how you’ll track reply times for all the ways customers contact you (like email, chat, social). Define a clear process for recording response times across all support channels (more on this below).

• Account for business hours. Clearly state your business’s support hours and factor them into your calculations. For example, say you reply on Monday morning to a query that arrived late on the previous Friday. It would be misleading to measure FRT in days instead of business hours.

• Count real replies only. Clearly define what constitutes a “substantive” first response. Make sure everyone knows what a helpful, human reply looks like. Generally, this means you should exclude automated responses.

• Synchronize the clock. Double-check that all your computers and phones are synced to the right time and time zone.

• Write it down. Document all procedures for determining the first response time to keep everyone on the same page.

• Keep checking. Regularly look at your reply times to see if you’re improving.

2. Determine the time of initial inquiry

Once you have a system on board, you’re ready to calculate first response time.

Record the exact time when a customer submits their support request. This could be the time an email is received, a chat message is sent, a social media direct message arrives, or a support ticket is created. There are tools you can use to capture this information:

• Free or low-cost ticketing systems. Options like Zendesk’s free tier or Help Scout’s basic options use automation tools to record the time a ticket is created from an email.

• Live chat platforms. Tawk.to and Facebook Messenger’s business features will automatically time stamp messages.

• Social media management tools. For social media messaging channels, hubs like Hootsuite or Buffer provide timestamped records.

3. Determine the time of first response

Write down the exact time a real person on your team sends the first helpful reply to a customer’s question. There are a few ways you can note the time:

• An automatic ticketing system will note the time a ticket is created (inquiry time) and the time of each agent’s response.

• If your system doesn’t automatically know the difference between a quick “got it” and a real answer, your support staff can manually record the time they sent a helpful reply.

• For email customer queries, you can use a spreadsheet to record the inquiry time and response time.

• Live chat platforms and social media management tools will automatically timestamp messages.

4. Calculate the difference

Subtract the time of the initial customer inquiry from the time of the first response. The difference will be the first response time for customer interactions.

First response time = Time of first response – Time of initial inquiry

Here’s a hypothetical example:

1. A customer sends an email to your Shopify store’s customer support team at 2:30 p.m. PT on Monday regarding a question about product sizing.

2. A customer service agent replies at 3:15 p.m. PT on the same day.

3. Using the formula: 3:15 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. = 45 minutes, we calculate the first response time for the inquiry to be 45 minutes.

Average first response time (AFRT)

Looking at the average time it takes to reply to customers gives you a better overall picture of how quickly your customer service team responds, instead of just looking at individual interactions.

Average first response time (AFRT) is the sum of all first response times divided by the total number of resolved tickets or inquiries made within a time frame.

Here’s why AFRT is beneficial:

• More holistic metric. Isolated response times don’t tell the whole story. AFRT offers a big-picture understanding of how quickly your customer service team responds to initial inquiries. It’s a solid indicator of your team’s performance.

• Identify trends and bottlenecks. By tracking the average reply time over weeks or months, you can identify wider problems and troubleshoot solutions.

• Track the impact of new customer service strategies. You can see if new ways of handling customer questions are working by comparing the average reply time before and after you made strategic changes.

• Monitor service-level agreements (SLAs). SLAs are formal agreements between a service provider and a customer that define expectations for the level of excellent service. For example, IT service desks will use key performance indicators to track if they meet a promised service level, like uptime and resolution times. 

How to calculate AFRT

To calculate your average response time, divide the total of first response times by the number of inquiries or tickets.

AFRT = Sum of first response times / Number of inquiries

There are different ways to calculate the average. Some experts recommend using the median (the middle value of a data set) rather than the average to avoid outliers skewing the data. Here’s why:

• For the average, a very high or very low value could warp the number, making it an inaccurate representation of the typical value.

• The median average is unaffected by extremes, since it only considers the position of the middle value.

For example, imagine most response times to customer requests are within a few minutes, but a few inquiries take hours to respond due to complex customer issues. The average response time would be inflated, making it seem like your team is slower than it really is. The median response time would be a more accurate measure of typical response time.

It’s always wise to pay attention to the outliers in any case, and you might report both types of AFRTs for the sake of a more well-rounded view. Ask why the anomalies are happening and how to respond to them faster.

Tips to improve your first response time

• Choose a customer service platform
• Build a knowledge base
• Use customer service response templates
• Train your customer support agents

Here are a few ways to improve your first response time and customer satisfaction:

Choose a customer service platform

To support customers faster, you can use software that automatically routes different question types (like shipping, product inquiries, and returns) to the right person. The software you choose should also allow you to see the entire customer interaction history, even if it happens with different agents on different channels.

Choose a customer support platform that integrates with your ecommerce platform or content management system and includes intelligent routing rules for different support channels. Here are some options:

• Dedicated customer support software. Help desk tools like Zendesk, Help Scout, and Freshdesk have multiple customer support capabilities. For example, you can use Zendesk to process customer support tickets from anywhere with its mobile app.

• Ecommerce-specific platforms. Tools such as Zendesk and Gorgias are designed for online stores. Gorgias is a help desk and live chat customer service platform that merges all customer conversations into one unified platform.

• Social media hubs. Tools such as Hootsuite or Buffer have message routing for customer questions on Facebook, X, and other social sites so you can reply to customer questions, consolidate conversations in one place, and send replies to users on the channel they used to reach out.

Build a knowledge base

Create a comprehensive, searchable, accessible resource hub on your website that answers frequently asked questions about your products, shipping policies, return procedures, and other common concerns.

If you give customers ways to find answers on their own, like a help or FAQ page, you’ll get fewer support questions. This lets your team spend more time solving the more complex issues.

Use customer service response templates

Create informative, ready-made customer service response templates for common questions, like “Where is my order?” or “How do I return this?” Your team can then tweak these predefined responses and send them out quickly.

Train your customer support agents

Give support agents the right tools and teach them everything they need to know about your products, rules, and how to help customers across different communication channels. A well-trained customer support team can solve problems faster and won’t need to ask as many questions.