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.
What is 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.
Also: TTR · time to resolution · time to close
Resolved is not the same as closed
Plenty of tools auto-close conversations with no activity for a few days. Those closures land in the average and improve it, even though the customer left without an answer. If your resolution time drops in the same month your reopen rate climbs, this is what happened.
Why it matters
What changes in a SaaS
It is the metric that best reflects the real cost. A high resolution time almost never means writing takes long: it means there are waits, handoffs between people, or missing information the customer had to supply twice. Every one of those stretches is time somebody pays for.
Resolution time in detail
How it is calculated
The mean — and median — time between opening and resolution. It is worth segmenting by type: mixing "I forgot my password" with "your webhook has been failing for two days" produces a number that decides nothing.
Subtracting the wait on the customer
If you asked for a screenshot and it took two days to arrive, those two days say nothing about your team. Almost every tool can pause the clock while the ball is in the other court, and without that the number is useless for management.
Where the time hides
In three places, nearly always: the context hunt before replying, the handoff to another person who starts from zero, and the back-and-forth to obtain a fact that could have been looked up. All three shrink with access to the data, not with more people.
How Intake handles it
Questions about resolution time
Is the time waiting on the customer subtracted?
It should be. Otherwise the number measures the customer calendar rather than the team work, and conversations with several rounds look like disasters when they may have gone fine.
What is a good resolution time?
There is no figure comparable across companies, because it depends on how complex the product is. What is useful is comparing yourself to yourself by segment and watching the trend, rather than hunting for an industry benchmark.
Why is my resolution time falling while satisfaction falls too?
That usually signals premature closures: things get closed fast that were not resolved, and the customer reopens or leaves. Crossing resolution time with reopen rate confirms it in a minute.
Related terms
A term on its own is only half understood. These come up in the same conversation.
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.
FCR — First contact resolution
First contact resolution is the percentage of questions resolved in the first interaction, without the customer having to write again and without the conversation passing to another person. It is the metric that best summarises whether the team has what it needs to answer within reach.
Escalation
Escalation is handing a conversation to somebody with more knowledge or more permissions to resolve it. It can go from one support tier to another, from an automated agent to a person, or from support to engineering — and in every case whoever receives it has not seen the case until that moment.
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.
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.
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.
