What is average response time and how is it affected by AI?

What is average response time?

Average response time measures how long your teams take to respond to customer queries and helps you evaluate the effectiveness of your customer interactions. A quick response time is vital for maintaining a high customer satisfaction score and building trust.

Fast response time can also lead to greater business success. Responding promptly to an online shopping query can help make that sale and so increase sales overall, and through speedy yet reliable customer support you can encourage greater customer loyalty, all of which helps boost your brand.

How do you calculate your average response time?

To calculate your average response time, add up all your response times for each interaction your contact teams deal with and divide this total by the number of interactions overall.

Total response time ÷ Total interactions = Average response time

This simple calculation shows you how quickly your teams engage with customers. If your teams respond to 250 queries and it takes 1,000 minutes altogether, your average response time would be 4 minutes per query.

Why does the average response time matter?

Your average response time can directly influence Net Promoter Score (NPS) and brand reputation, since customers don’t like to wait for support. They also won’t recommend you to others if they’re always waiting for a long time to get through to or hear back from your contact teams. In fact, Forrester found “63% of customers will leave a company after just one poor experience, and almost two-thirds will no longer wait more than 2 minutes for assistance.”

Regular tracking of your average response time can help identify and release bottlenecks around support, relieving pressure from your teams to better please your customers. This goes some way to showing you provide exceptional service and stand out in a competitive marketplace, especially where others are failing. The Institute of Customer Service says “companies that have maintained higher customer satisfaction than their sector average have achieved stronger revenue growth (7% points more),” so it’s good for your bank balance too.

What is a good average response time?

In the past, a good benchmark for average response time in customer service has typically fallen within a few minutes, but Microsoft found “some UK customers are waiting up to 85 minutes to speak to representatives at some of the country’s largest providers of consumer goods and services”. Where high call volumes are becoming unmanageable, business leaders now routinely turn to AI to speed up support services.

Adapting to AI to improve average response time

Like many organisations, your telephone communications might currently command the largest piece of what we call the customer service pie and response times hinge on standard business hours of 9-5. The problem is, if your support is only active for eight hours a day, you’re not responding to people for the other 16 hours.

Using an AI assistant keeps your support open 24/7 and is a far less expensive ‘pie strategy’ when you consider the typical UK cost per call is £6.26 according to ContactBabel.

Introducing AI the easy way

AI might be everywhere now, but you don’t have to panic or rush change in your organisation. You can have a warm handover to AI-powered services and simply start by routing your phone queries through AI-driven IVR to speed up your average response rate. Rather than a traditional IVR system that forces customers to choose from a list of set options to find the team they need to speak with, they can simply say what they need using AI. With natural language processing (NLP) capability, a next-generation AI assistant can recognise what the customer is asking for and route them through to the right department straight away with no wait time at all.

On top of that, you can add AI telephony, where the AI assistant solves the problem independently on behalf of your teams over the phone. There’s no time wasted transferring your customer through to an agent and you automatically increase your goal completion rate too, where an AI assistant solves routine customer service queries at top speed. Your teams can then give greater attention to solving more the complex, unusual, or sensitive queries effectively and efficiently that demand their unique skills and experience.

Leisure providers, Mytime Active, transformed their customer service in just six months with the introduction of AI-powered support.

Measuring your results during a switch to AI

Because you’re measuring how long it takes to respond to customers in seconds with an AI assistant, rather than minutes over the phone (or days for email), be mindful of logging the difference in performance as you introduce AI. Look at your average response time without an AI assistant and directly compare this to the average response time after you’ve launched one to see clearly the value it’s adding to your business.

Financially, you’ll also want to measure your return on investment, which you can do before you even sign up for an AI assistant using our handy savings calculator.

Use an AI assistant to speed up service

You can launch an AI assistant today using only your website URL and it’ll be ready in less than 10 minutes to start rapidly reducing your average response time.