What is average handling time (AHT)?
Optimizing average handling time (AHT), known in French as "durée moyenne de traitement" (DMT), is essential to improve your call center's operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. An AHT that is too long can reveal organizational inefficiencies or training needs, while an AHT that is too short can point to customer issues not being properly resolved.
By learning the best practices for managing and reducing AHT, you can not only increase your agents' productivity but also deliver a better customer experience. This article gives you concrete strategies and practical tips to calculate and control AHT and turn your contact center into a model of efficiency and quality.
What is average handling time?
AHT is the average time needed to handle a customer interaction from start to finish. It includes several components:
- Average talk time (ATT)
- Hold time
- Post-call follow-up time, also called after-call work (ACW)
This metric is essential to improve your contact center's performance while ensuring customer satisfaction. An average handling time that is too long may indicate organizational or training issues. Conversely, one that is too short may indicate partial or rushed resolution of customer issues.
Why AHT matters
Average handling time plays an important role in your customer relationship. Analyzing AHT helps you improve customer service quality by identifying weak points at each stage of your customer interactions and putting strategies in place to fix them.
An optimized AHT means agents handle more requests, which improves productivity. And the more efficient your agents are, the more you reduce wait times, which contributes to a better customer experience.
Fast handling can improve the customer experience, but be careful not to sacrifice service quality. Pairing AHT with your CSAT surveys will help you strike the right balance between efficiency and the quality of the customer experience.
In short, continuously measuring and adjusting AHT helps deliver a superior experience, boosting customer satisfaction while optimizing productivity and handling costs.
How to calculate average handling time in a call center
To calculate average handling time (AHT) in a call center, add up all of its components. As a reminder, these are:
- Average talk time (ATT): the time the agent spends talking with the customer.
- Hold time: the time during which the customer is waiting, often because they have been put on hold or are going through an interactive voice response (IVR) system.
- Follow-up time or after-call work (ACW): the time the agent uses to finish processing the call after hanging up.
The formula is therefore:
AHT = ATT + hold time + ACW
AHT varies by industry and by the nature of requests. It is therefore crucial to adapt your performance targets to your type of customers and your products or services.
6 tips to reduce AHT in your customer contact center
Analyze all your calls with speech analytics
Speech analytics is a powerful technology that can transform the way you evaluate call quality (quality monitoring). By transcribing and analyzing every phone conversation, you can identify trends, recurring problems and bottlenecks. This helps you understand why some calls take longer than necessary to handle and make targeted improvements.
Offer agents targeted training and personalized coaching
Investing in targeted training and personalized coaching for your agents is essential to optimize average handling time in your call center. By providing training tailored to each agent's specific needs, you can improve their skills, engagement and efficiency. This results in faster, more effective call handling while maintaining high service quality.
Using automated evaluations from speech analytics and manual call reviews by supervisors, you will be able to identify where each agent can improve. Use this information to create tailor-made training programs that meet their specific needs. At the same time, set up personalized coaching sessions to provide ongoing support and practical advice.
Automate repetitive tasks
Administrative and routine tasks, such as updating customer records, sending follow-up emails or entering data, can consume valuable time that your agents could spend on more complex, high-value interactions.
To implement automation, first identify the repetitive tasks that can be automated without harming service quality. Use tools and software designed to automate these processes, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems with built-in automation features.
By reducing the time spent on these tasks, your agents can focus on resolving customer issues quickly and effectively, which helps lower AHT and improve the overall customer experience.
Simplify and standardize internal processes
Complex, non-standardized processes can lead to inefficiencies, errors and longer handling times. By streamlining these processes, you can make operations run more smoothly and enable your agents to handle calls faster and more efficiently.
Start by mapping your current processes to identify redundant or unnecessary steps. Then work to simplify them by removing obstacles and automating steps wherever possible. Standardize procedures so that all agents follow the same steps when handling calls. This reduces variation and ensures a consistent, efficient approach.
By making processes simpler and more uniform, you will help your agents navigate their daily tasks more easily, which helps reduce AHT and deliver a better customer experience.
Optimize your inbound and outbound call scripts
Well-designed scripts allow your agents to handle calls more smoothly and efficiently, while ensuring that essential information is communicated clearly and quickly.
To optimize your scripts, start by analyzing existing conversations to identify where calls tend to drag on unnecessarily. Simplify and clarify messages by removing redundant information and structuring scripts logically. Include ready-made answers to frequently asked questions and smooth transitions to guide agents through the call. Finally, test the scripts regularly with your agents and adjust them based on their feedback and performance data.
Set up a shared knowledge base for agents
A well-organized knowledge base gives your agents quick access to accurate, up-to-date information, which helps them answer customer questions faster and more effectively.
To create an effective knowledge base, start by gathering all the relevant information, such as FAQs, procedure guides, response scripts and solutions to common problems. Organize this information so that it is intuitive and easy to navigate. Make sure the knowledge base is updated regularly to reflect the latest information and procedures. You can also encourage agents to document new solutions they find to recurring problems to enrich this shared knowledge base.
By giving your agents quick access to a centralized resource, you reduce the time they spend looking for information, which helps lower AHT and improve customer service quality.
