Tools
AHT calculator
From a week’s or a month’s totals: how long each interaction takes and what it costs.
Average handle time
7 min 30 s
450 seconds per interaction
The detail
- Interactions per person per hour
- 8
- Cost per interaction
- €2.88
Trusted by teams at:
- and 20+ more companies
How it works
Three times divided by interactions
It is the call-centre formula applied to chat, email and WhatsApp: all the time someone on the team spends on the interactions of a period, divided by how many there were. The queue is left out: the time a customer waits until someone picks up their request is first response time.
AHT = (handling + searching or asking + after-contact work) ÷ interactions
Why average handle time matters
It’s how long your team spends on each request, and what changes most when an AI agent answers the repeated ones.
It adds up three times, not one
Handling, searching or asking and after-contact work, divided by interactions. Most reports only show the first.
Searching is what slips through
The data on another screen or the question to the teammate who knows. Hardly any tool times it, which is why the AHT in reports falls short.
Repeats shouldn’t reach the team
An AI agent answers what is in your documentation and hands the rest to a person, with the whole conversation. The team’s AHT drops without worse answers.
Frequently asked questions about AHT
What is a good AHT?
It depends on the channel and on what customers ask: a password reset doesn’t take as long as a billing issue. Tracking your own month by month, by request type, next to first contact resolution, tells you more than comparing yourself with other teams’ averages.
Does AHT include queue time?
No. It only counts the time someone on the team spends on the interaction. What the customer waits before being served goes into first response time.
How do I work out the hourly cost of one person?
Add employer costs to the annual gross salary (in Spain, about a third more) and divide by hours worked per year: around 1,760 full time. A €30,000 salary comes to about €23 an hour.
Does it work for chat, email and WhatsApp?
Yes, the formula is the same on every channel. If you can, work it out separately: in chat people handle several conversations at once and email allows longer replies, so an average of both describes neither.
Do you store what I enter?
No. The maths runs in your browser and nothing you type is sent anywhere.
