FRT — First response time
First response time is how long passes between a customer sending their question and receiving the first reply from a person. It measures the initial wait, not the resolution, and it is the metric that weighs most heavily on whether support feels good or not.
What is first response time?
First response time is how long passes between a customer sending their question and receiving the first reply from a person. It measures the initial wait, not the resolution, and it is the metric that weighs most heavily on whether support feels good or not.
Also: FRT · first reply time
Auto-acknowledgements do not count
The automatic "we got your message" is not a first response, and counting it as one turns the metric into decoration: every team that does it has a first response time of two seconds and none of them knows how long their customer actually waits. The same goes for bot replies that resolve nothing — if the customer has to write again, the wait has not ended.
Why it matters
What changes in a SaaS
It is the metric the customer lives. Resolution time can be long if the problem is complex and that is understood; what is not forgiven is silence, because in silence the customer does not know whether you read them. Which is why a fast reply saying "I am looking into this, I will write before six" improves satisfaction even though it resolves nothing.
First response time in detail
How it is calculated
The mean time between the customer first message and the first human reply, across the conversations in a period. It is worth looking at the median too: a handful of conversations abandoned over a weekend drag the whole mean and hide the fact that everything else is fine.
Business hours change the number
There are two ways to measure it and they give very different results: clock time or business time. A message that arrives Friday at seven and is answered Monday at nine is sixty-two clock hours or one business hour. Neither is wrong; what is wrong is not saying which one you use when you compare.
What counts as a good number
It depends on the channel and on what you promised. In chat, expectation is measured in minutes; in email, in hours. What actually matters is not the number but the distance between it and what the customer expected — and you set that expectation by saying when you reply.
How to improve it without hiring
By setting the expectation in writing, warning about what you already know is coming before anybody asks, and letting the questions whose answer needs nobody resolve themselves. What does not work is asking the team to type faster: the time goes on hunting for context, not on typing.
How Intake handles it
Questions about first response time
Do automatic replies count towards first response time?
They should not. An automatic acknowledgement answers nothing, and counting it leaves the metric at zero for everyone. The first response is the first one that says something about the case, whether a person wrote it or an agent that genuinely resolves it.
What is the difference between first response time and resolution time?
The first measures how long the customer waits to know you read them; the second, how long they wait to have the problem solved. They can move in opposite directions: replying fast and badly lengthens resolution.
Is it measured in business hours or clock hours?
Both are used. Business hours are fairer to the team; clock hours are truer to what the customer experiences. What matters is saying which one you are using, especially if you commit to it in a service level agreement.
Related terms
A term on its own is only half understood. These come up in the same conversation.
Resolution time
Resolution time is how long passes between a question arriving and it being resolved and closed. Unlike first response time, it measures the whole process, including waits on the customer and escalations to other teams.
SLA — Service level agreement
A service level agreement is the written commitment to respond within set deadlines. It fixes maximum times — usually first response and resolution — defines the hours in which they count, and normally states what happens when they are missed.
CSAT — Customer satisfaction
CSAT is the metric that measures how satisfied a customer was with one specific interaction. It is asked right after resolving — usually on a one-to-five scale or a thumbs up and down — and expressed as the percentage of positive answers over total answers.
AHT — Average handle time
Average handle time is the time an agent actively spends on a question: reading it, finding the context, answering it and logging whatever needs logging. It excludes waits, which is why it is the metric that best approximates what a given support volume costs in hours.
Ticket backlog
The backlog is the set of questions open and still unresolved at a given moment. More than its size, what gets watched is its trend: if more questions come in than get closed, the backlog grows, and it grows cumulatively even when the daily difference is small.
Deflection rate
Deflection rate is the percentage of questions resolved without a person getting involved, either because the customer found the answer themselves or because an automated agent closed it. It is the metric used to justify any investment in self-service or in AI.
