How FRT is measured
FRT = Timestamp of first agent reply − Timestamp of customer's first message
Auto-acknowledgements ("we got your message") typically don't count. Substantive responses do.
Channel benchmarks for 2026
| Channel | Customer expectation | Best-in-class |
|---|---|---|
| Live chat | Under 1 minute | Under 30 seconds |
| Under 15 minutes | Under 2 minutes | |
| Social | Under 1 hour | Under 15 minutes |
| Under 24 hours | Under 1 hour | |
| Phone | Under 1 minute | Under 30 seconds |
Four levers to reduce FRT
- AI auto-response for FAQ-like inquiries (deflects without an agent)
- Smart routing to the right team on first touch (no manual triage delay)
- Saved replies / macros for common patterns
- Unified inbox to eliminate tab-switching
In practice, the biggest single win is AI deflection — it removes 30–50% of inquiries from the human queue entirely, dropping average FRT for the remainder.
Common use cases
- Diagnosing whether agent staffing or process is the bottleneck
- Setting SLAs by channel and customer tier
- Tracking improvements after AI or workflow changes
Related terms
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)
CSAT — Customer Satisfaction Score — is a survey metric measuring how satisfied a customer was with a specific interaction, usually on a 1–5 scale, reported as the percentage of respondents scoring 4 or 5.
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
A service-level agreement (SLA) in customer support is a documented commitment about how fast tickets will be acknowledged and resolved, typically expressed as a time threshold by priority or customer tier.
Ticket Deflection
Ticket deflection is the practice of resolving customer questions before they become an agent-handled ticket — typically via self-service knowledge bases, AI agents, or smart routing.
MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution)
MTTR — Mean Time to Resolution — is the average elapsed time from when a support ticket is opened to when it's resolved, measured across a defined period.
See first response time (frt) in Bublly
Bublly bundles unified inbox, AI agents, ticketing, and analytics — covering everything in this glossary in one platform.
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