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As consumers, we want our issues resolved quickly, whether troubleshooting a technical problem or getting help tracking an order.
For contact centers, managing efficiency KPIs like average handle time (AHT) is crucial. The longer agents spend on each call, the harder it is to answer every call and serve each customer efficiently. The average amount of time agents spend on phone calls directly impacts overall agent productivity. When calls take too long, queues grow, wait times increase, and customers become frustrated.
Improving your AHT will allow your contact center to streamline operations, improve customer satisfaction, and boost overall efficiency. By focusing on strategies to lower AHT, you can create a more productive environment for both agents and customers.
What is average handle time (AHT)?
AHT measures the total time an agent spends on customer interactions, from initiation to resolution. This includes total hold time, follow-up actions, and post-call work, which all impact the overall efficiency of your contact center.
The importance of maintaining a healthy average handle time
While it’s essential to consider all call center metrics for a full picture of the customer experience, improving your AHT can bring several key benefits to your organization:
Optimized resource allocation
A healthy AHT allows you to make the most of your resources. By ensuring customer calls are handled efficiently, you can improve agent productivity and avoid overstaffing or underutilization of your team. Effective use of your teams means each agent can focus on delivering quality service without being bogged down by inefficiencies or unnecessarily long calls.
Making the most of your resources shouldn’t mean pressuring your agents to rush their calls at the expense of quality. You must strike a balance between efficient and personalized, thorough customer service.
Better performance metrics
Resolving routine customer questions quickly can help you improve other contact center performance metrics, like your abandonment rate, as agents respond to waiting customers more efficiently. However, concentrating only on one key metric can cause you to miss important aspects of customer experience and overall service quality. For example, your agents might reduce call time but leave issues unresolved, negatively impacting first contact resolution (FCR), and a push for faster resolution can negatively impact CSAT and NPS scores, particularly if it leads to increased follow-up time.
Higher customer retention rates
Long wait times, misrouting, and poor follow-up processes will frustrate customers, pushing them toward your competitors. You’re more likely to create loyal customers when you deliver quick and effective customer service. Maintaining a healthy AHT helps leave a lasting positive memory of your service, keeps customers happy, and gives them confidence your organization is capable of helping when they have an issue.
Process improvement
Monitoring your AHT can help to highlight inefficiencies and bottlenecks in your processes. If your agents are spending too long on certain types of calls, it can signal areas where you should consider automating processes, offering agents more training, enhancing your knowledge base, or working with other departments in your organization to improve points in your customer’s journey that are creating snagging points and a reason to call.
The metrics you must know to evaluate the impact of call center voice AI
Get your copyHow to calculate average handle time
You can calculate your average handle time by dividing the total number of interactions in a given period by the total talk time, hold time, and after-call work time. The formula is as follows:
For example, if your agent spends 270 minutes actively speaking with customers, customers are on hold for 45 minutes, 60 minutes are spent completing post-call activities (updating customer details, processing tickets, etc.), and your agent completes 55 calls, your average handle time will be 6.82 minutes.
Top signs that your average handle time is too high
If your AHT is too high, it can lead to several negative outcomes for both your customers and your agents. Here are some key signs that your AHT might be causing problems in your contact center, from high call abandonment rates to increased employee turnover.
Increased call abandonment rate
When customers pick up the phone for help and face long wait times and prerecorded messages, it’s difficult not to take it personally, especially when they can just as easily take their business elsewhere. A rising call abandonment rate suggests a potential gap between customer expectations and your contact center’s efficiency. If customers consistently abandon calls, it likely means they’re waiting too long.
Low customer satisfaction scores (CSAT)
CSAT reflects the quality of customer experience as reported by customers. A low CSAT score can indicate various issues, such as inaccurate call routing, inadequate problem resolution, or long wait times.
While an increased AHT could be driving your CSAT scores down, you should assess it in line with your other efficiency metrics, like your average speed of answer, call transfer rate, and call abandonment rate, to pinpoint specific areas in the customer journey that might be impacting your customers’ experience with your brand.
Agent burnout and turnover
Employee turnover rate in contact centers can be 30-45% higher than in other jobs, mainly due to repetitive tasks, lack of career growth, high stress, and low pay. If your AHT is increasing, it could be due to agents who lack the adequate training required to handle more complex calls, inefficient and complex processes to follow to resolve customer issues, or dealing with difficult customers who call about routine and repetitive problems.
Frequent callbacks
When customers regularly call back, it’s a clear sign that their problems aren’t being fully resolved in a single interaction. This not only frustrates customers but also increases your AHT as agents spend more time re-addressing concerns that should have been resolved initially. Frequent callbacks can signal inefficiencies in your resolution processes or inadequate agent training, both of which drive up handle time and negatively impact customer experience.
Increased costs
Every minute your agent spends on a call adds to your operational costs. A high AHT means more staffing hours are required to handle the same volume of customer interactions, leading to increased labor costs. If your AHT is too high, you may need to hire more agents to handle the workload or look at ways to automate repetitive calls.
Streamline workflows with intelligent call routing
If a customer asks to speak to an agent, the process should be frictionless. PolyAI voice assistants can hand them off to an agent after asking clarifying questions and gathering additional information to reduce the need for the customer to repeat themselves when handed over to an agent and decrease the time to resolution.
You can also use this open-ended feedback from the conversation to generate new customer insights and improve operational efficiency.
Empowering agents and enhancing efficiency: PolyAI's voice assistant reshapes customer care for Atos
Read the case study5 tips for reducing your average handle time
Reducing average handle time (AHT) plays an important role in improving your customer service and operational efficiency in your call center. Here are some tips to reduce your AHT.
1. Optimize call routing
Traditional automated systems, like keyword-driven IVRs, limit how customers can explain their problems. This restrictive experience leads to misunderstandings and customers being passed around to different support teams without resolving their issues.
Enterprises are turning to AI-driven solutions like voice assistants to give callers the freedom to explain their issues in detail. In many cases, these solutions can resolve issues without input from an agent. If an agent is needed, a voice assistant can ask clarifying questions and gather additional information before handing the conversation over.
This approach reduces the need for the agent to handle the first portion of the call and significantly contributes to reducing AHT by ensuring that agents are better prepared when they take over the conversation.
2. Identify high-volume, routine calls
High-volume, routine calls make up a large portion of an agent’s workload, even though customers can resolve many of these queries online or using alternative self-service tools.
Using the structured conversational data generated by a voice assistant, you can identify the high-volume, low-value calls causing bottlenecks in your processes and preventing customers with complex issues from getting through.
By automating the low-value parts of a call, like customer order numbers, ID&V, or simple FAQs, a voice assistant can drive down AHTs by 20-30%, giving your call center additional capacity without sacrificing customer service.
3. Improve customer self-service options
Customers aren’t short of self-service options. The problem is these self-service options don’t always deliver the experience your customers need – they’re difficult to navigate, outdated, or overly complicated. Instead of developing more self-service options, companies need a better way to make the most of the channels they have already invested in.
When customers call, it’s not enough to tell them to “go online,” They need to know where to go and how to use self-service options effectively. A voice assistant can bridge the gap between the phone channel and existing self-service options by providing useful links via text and email to specific resources that answer customer questions.
4. Provide ongoing agent training
Ongoing training helps agents stay current with product updates, service changes, and best practices so they can handle calls faster and more effectively. However, agents have to manage high call volumes, after-call work, and limited breaks, making it difficult to find time for training.
By implementing voice AI in your contact center, routine queries can be handled by a voice assistant, freeing up your agents to upskill and develop their careers within the contact center and beyond.
5. Share your customer insights across your business
When customers run into problems on digital channels like a website bug, app downtime, or login errors, they turn to the phone for help which drives up call volume and AHT in the contact center.
If your contact center can surface technical issues and customer preferences and report these issues back to your digital teams, you can address the root cause, reduce call volume, and free up your staff to focus on building more valuable customer relationships.
Optimize call center average handle time with PolyAI’s advanced solutions
PolyAI is changing how your business provides customer support, solves customer problems proactively, and makes informed decisions throughout your organization.
Automate routine inquiries to free up agent’s time
PolyAI clients have reported that 30-60% of agent time is spent answering queries that could be easily resolved online or through other, cheaper channels. Deploying a PolyAI voice assistant to automate the low-value part of a call can drive down AHT by 20-30% and give more capacity to your contact center.
Streamline workflows with intelligent call routing
If a customer asks to speak to an agent, the process should be frictionless. PolyAI voice assistants can hand off to an agent after asking clarifying questions and gathering additional information, to reduce the need for the customer to repeat themselves when handed over to an agent and decrease the time to resolution.
You can also use this open-ended feedback from the conversation to generate new customer insights and improve operational efficiency.
Maximize your self-service options
Instead of relying on a ‘press 1 for this, press 2 for that’ approach of IVR systems, PolyAI voice assistants give customers the freedom to explain their issues in as much detail as they need, which allows us to direct customers to the exact online resources they need without the need to speak to an agent.
Unlock contextual insights
With traditional systems like automated IVR, customers would express a problem and ask for help with a single keyword or phrase. With conversational AI systems like a PolyAI voice assistant, the way customers communicate has evolved. They engage in more detailed and context-rich conversations.
Businesses can gather valuable real-time data from these conversations, enabling them to better understand customer needs. This shift allows your contact center to go beyond solving immediate issues and become an insight center for customer excellence.
Discover how PolyAI can help improve your AHT and supercharge your contact center efficiency.
Average handle time FAQs
Several factors can lead to an increase in average handle time (AHT), including:
- Complex issues: Calls involving more complicated problems require more time to resolve.
- Lack of agent knowledge or training: If an agent isn’t familiar with the issue or product, they might spend longer on the call.
- System inefficiencies: Slow or difficult-to-navigate systems can delay call handling.
- Customer confusion: If the customer doesn’t clearly communicate the issue, it can extend the time needed to address it.
A few common misconceptions about average handle time include:
- Shorter is always better: A shorter AHT isn’t necessarily good if it comes at the expense of solving the customer’s problem thoroughly.
- It’s the only metric that matters: AHT is important, but other factors like customer satisfaction and first-call resolution are just as crucial.
- All calls should aim for the same AHT: Not every issue can or should be resolved in the same amount of time, as different problems require different levels of effort.
Average handle time (AHT) directly affects the efficiency of a contact center. The longer call center agents spend handling each interaction, the fewer customers they can serve in a given period, leading to increased wait times and customer dissatisfaction.
