Average handle time (AHT) for email, chat and phone

The International Customer Management Institute, ICMI, calls it average handling time in its guide to contact centre metrics. A contact is one call, chat or email. The number exists for staffing, since it tells you how many hours of work a given number of contacts will take.

Average handle time from talk, hold and wrap-up

After-call work, also called wrap-up, is the logging and follow-up once the caller has gone. ICMI’s guide adds just talk time and after-call work. NiCE’s glossary and Genesys’s glossary name hold time as a third part, and NiCE’s description of the sum adds conference time.

An email has no talk time. Brad Cleveland’s contact centre glossary counts the time spent handling it plus any work that follows.

A two-person software company timed a week of support. Its 50 emails took 400 minutes of reading, checking customer accounts and writing replies, so its average handle time was 8 minutes. The company expects 300 emails in the month after a launch. At 8 minutes each, that is 40 hours of work, a full working week for one person.

Only the mean multiplies back to the hours worked. ICMI’s formula for occupancy, how busy agents are in a half-hour, multiplies AHT by the number of contacts too. Gorgias’s metrics use the mean for handle time and the median for response and resolution times.

Handle times vary a lot between businesses. A Kustomer analysis of its retail clients from March to August 2020 found handle times from 0.82 minutes to 46.6 minutes.

Handling time as six helpdesks count it

Support teams answer email and chat from helpdesk software, which files each request as a ticket. The six below each time an email ticket differently.

Here is one refund email handled three ways. An agent opens it, spends 4 minutes checking the order and moves on. After a 10-minute chat with someone else, they open the email again and write the reply in 3 minutes.

Help Scout keeps only the last visit, 3 minutes. Gorgias and Freshdesk count both spells with the email in front of the agent, 7 minutes. If the agent had asked the customer a question and the ticket had waited overnight as pending, Zendesk’s email dashboard would count that night too.

Chats running side by side

One agent often runs several chats at once. Genesys’s note on chat concurrency says the AHT then includes overlapping time and “can appear inflated”. Its staffing step takes the overlap out before counting agent effort. Microsoft’s conversation metrics count only the time a chat is the agent’s open tab.

Chat duration is a different number again. LiveChat’s customer service report, last updated in 2024, puts the average chat among businesses using LiveChat at 8 minutes 25 seconds, from start to finish. It says nothing about wrap-up, and an agent can spend those minutes on several chats at once.

Published handle times, nearly all for phone calls

Only figures with a named source are listed, and none of them is for email. All of them, and the Kustomer and LiveChat figures, were read on 19 September 2026.

Six minutes is often quoted as a good handle time, and it comes from three unrelated places. Talkdesk’s guide to AHT suggests about six minutes as a starting target and gives no data for it. Cornell’s 6.1 minutes is from 2003. The 6 minutes 3 seconds on Call Centre Helper’s list of industry standards is based on 190,702 entries typed into its online staffing calculator.

Self-service leaves your team the longer questions

ContactBabel’s guide says US service calls got longer largely because self-service took away the easier and shorter calls. SQM’s list of call centre standards puts the yearly rise in AHT over the last decade down partly to the same thing.

A chatbot on your website is self-service too, though none of these studies measured one on its own. Deacon is one of those. The questions it answers from your documentation never reach your inbox, so a rising average after you add one can mean it is working. ICMI’s 2003 tutorial says a rising AHT “may be a positive indication”.

Targets that push agents to rush

ICMI’s guide says AHT is best used for planning, and should not be a strict standard for each agent. Rewarding agents for short calls “could obviously lead to them dropping difficult calls or not answering customers fully”, in ContactBabel’s words.

Many call centres set one anyway. In a 2016 Call Centre Helper poll of 194 webinar attendees, 47% targeted agents on AHT, and 25% measured agents on it without telling them. Using it for planning was the most common answer, at 72%.

A longer contact that solves the problem saves a second one. MetricNet says handle times rise as first contact resolution rises.

Handle time beside resolution time and response time

An email that takes 7 minutes of work can take two days to resolve. Average resolution time runs until the problem is solved, and usually counts the hours the ticket sat waiting. MetricNet’s column separates the two.

First response time is the wait for your first reply. The phone equivalent is the average speed of answer. ICMI averages that delay over every answered contact, including those answered at once.