Average handle
time (AHT) is a metric for the total average duration of a single contact,
including any customer hold time (if Chat or Phone), talk time and the
follow-up or admin after work tasks related to that contact.
For chat you also
need to include concurrency in your calculation for AHT by dividing single
session times by total logged in “productive time engaged in chats” and all
offline/load must be removed from equation.
There is no
doubt about it the good old Average handle time (AHT) metric is an important
metric in workforce management workload forecasting. In fact, any type of moving
average metric is extremely useful for forecasting long-term trends. However,
be aware there are some flaws in using averages in any forecasting effort, and
much depends on how spread your outliers are in the histogram of the
average. For example, as was written by Sam Savage for the Harvard Business
Review:
Consider the case of the statistician who drowns while fording a river that he calculates is, on average, three feet deep. If he were alive to tell the tale, he would expound on the “flaw of averages,” which states, simply, that plans based on assumptions about average conditions usually go wrong. This basic but almost always unseen flaw shows up everywhere in business, distorting accounts, undermining forecasts, and dooming apparently well-considered projects to disappointing results.
If you want to learn more about the flaws of averages here is a link
to that article: https://hbr.org/2002/11/the-flaw-of-averages.
Back to AHT. As
Cameron Turner says in the article “Let’s Talk About Average Handle Time. - for a while now, in the
contact centre scene it’s been popular to hate on Average Handle Time as metric,
with some even completely leaving this metric un-monitored and un-managed. This
thought process, whilst well meaning, is I am afraid completely flawed.
The advice
usually comes in the form of it being the “wrong” metric to focus on because it
creates bad agent behaviours not great for customer experience. i.e. it is focusing
the agent to concentrate on how quickly they can get through the call instead
of how well they can meet the customers’ needs or the customer experience.
In other words,
this advice is basically saying; low AHT = low Quality experience or conversely
High AHT = High Quality experience. Sadly however this is typically very bad advice
and anyone who has attempted to correlate AHT with Quality, NPS or Customer Experience
(CustX) will find some Agents with low AHT having great quality/CustX and some
have terrible Quality/CustX or vice versa some agent having high AHT and great
quality/CustX and some have terrible.
I have run
similar correlation exercises as Cameron and also found there is simply very little correlation – yes AHT has to managed in the right way and agents should not be
taking short cuts in order to reduce their AHT. Additionally when assessing an Agent performance
on AHT it should also be recognised that the average is simply a midpoint of
all the conversations that are taking place in that channel. In fact when managing AHT
a more useful measure is the normal range of contact and assess abnormally long
or short contacts to see why they are different – either short or long outliers are
both bad for forecasting as well as indicators of something going wrong.
Anyway, what I
am very firm on is that completely dumping AHT as a metric is highly flawed for
any contact centre - both from a productivity perspective but also as a customer
experience outcome – yes believe it or not customers don’t want long conversations.
Last note on
AHT: there is no industry standard for the length of AHT, and it will highly
depend on:
- The complexity of
conversation between the customer and agent and or process the agent has to
complete to fulfil the customer’s request. For example, a simple "can you
send me this document request" could be a very quick AHT vs a
customer complaint. As organisations continue to roll out more digital,
chat bot, and app self-service functionality this will reduce the number
of simple transactional conversations so don’t be surprised when you see
your AHT rise in this scenario.
- The Tenure and
Experience of the Agent – this is natural when you first learn a new skill
it takes longer to complete; over time an agent will become more efficient.
- The technology
stability and page load time used by the agent.
Struggling to figure your why your call center AHT (Average handle time)
is up??? Check this Video out from Marlon:
