What is Average Handle Time and How Can You Improve It?
Average Handle Time (AHT) is a tried-and-true metric impacting several mission-critical contact center key performance indicators (KPIs). It provides strong signals on the effectiveness of various customer care considerations—from agent onboarding and training to the organization’s customer processes and its tools to empower agents to be successful.
A straightforward measure, AHT simply reflects how well a customer contact agent is equipped to handle customer inquiries, and it should be one of the defining metrics you use to understand how well your organization is delivering on your customer experience initiatives.
Calculating Average Handle Time (AHT)
The Average Handle Time formula is a simple calculation: It’s the average duration of the entire customer call, from the time the customer initiates the call to the termination of the call, including all hold and transfer times. Here’s a calculation that can be used:
AHT= (Total talk time + Total Hold time) + Total ACW / Total # of Calls
Average Handle Time is a metric that can be used to not only evaluate the performance of individual contact center agents but also to provide leadership benchmarks on the performance of both the individual department and the entire organization as a whole.
