First response time (FRT) and how fast to reply

To work it out, take the time each customer’s message arrived away from the time of your first reply, then average those waits across the conversations you answered. If your first replies to 30 customers last week came after waits that added up to 45 hours, your average first response time was 1 hour 30 minutes.

Zendesk calls it first reply time, and Jira Service Management sets up time to first response as one of its default deadlines. Either way, it’s the wait before a customer hears anything back.

For a founder answering support alone, that wait usually means the hours you were asleep, building or away from the inbox. Deacon is an AI customer support agent that answers your customers from your own docs in seconds, at any hour, and it has a free plan.

How to calculate first response time

Here’s a week of emails to a small software company, all answered.

The waits add up to 3,700 minutes, so the average is 8 hours 49 minutes. The Saturday email alone is 2,820 of those minutes. The median, the middle wait once the seven are sorted, is email 3 at 1 hour, and it would still be 1 hour if the Saturday email had waited a week.

Tools differ on which one they show. Help Scout’s email report and Freshdesk’s analytics show the average. Gorgias and Zendesk’s report recipe use the median, and Intercom’s reports offer both, calling the median more stable. Intercom’s guide to support metrics suggests watching the average and the median, and adding the 90th percentile, the wait that nine in ten customers stay under.

If you answer from Gmail with no helpdesk, a week of emails is enough to work it out yourself. Note when each message arrived and when you first replied, leaving out any thread you started. In a spreadsheet, subtract one from the other, then take the AVERAGE and the MEDIAN of the column.

What is a good first response time?

For email, an hour. In Toister’s survey, a reply within an hour met the expectations of 88% of people, and the median company on Freshworks’ products replied to a ticket in about an hour in 2024. For chat, the median was under a minute. These are the published figures we found with a named sample, read on 23 September 2026.

Helpdesk vendors suggest looser targets. Zendesk’s guide to support metrics gives 24 hours for email and web forms and 60 minutes for social media as example targets. A founder who replies to email within the hour is quicker than the typical company Freshworks measured, and on chat a reply needs to come in seconds.

Does a chatbot’s reply count as a first response?

In most helpdesks, no. An automatic email or a bot can reply seconds after every message, and most of the tools below leave that out, so a bot won’t lower the number they report.

A person’s reply can be empty too. Shopify’s guide counts a personal reply saying the request is being looked into. Gorgias’s guide says a first reply should address the customer’s question. Zendesk’s own metric stops at the first public comment from an agent, whatever it says.

What the customer notices is whether the first reply helped. An instant answer that solves the problem beats a personal “we’re on it” an hour later, whichever one your helpdesk counts. The CSAT entry covers asking customers how it went.

Business hours or calendar hours

Calendar hours count every hour, nights and weekends included. Business hours count only the time you’re open, so they show how your team performs and hide how long the customer waited.

A customer writes at 16:50 on a Friday and gets a reply at 09:40 on Monday. The calendar wait is 64 hours 50 minutes. A nine-to-five weekday clock counts 10 minutes on Friday and 40 on Monday, 50 minutes in all.

The tools split on this. Zendesk’s ready-made reports use calendar hours, and Gorgias counts every hour. Help Scout’s email report can switch to office hours, and Intercom counts only office hours once you’ve set them, so a first response time of “2 days” there means 48 office hours, however long the customer waited. Zendesk’s blog says to leave a weekend out if you’re closed then. Track calendar hours too, because that’s the wait your customers feel.

Four ways first response time misleads

A stock reply looks fast. Intercom’s guide says the number “can be gamed easily”, by “copying and pasting canned responses into messages”, and that making it anyone’s main target “isn’t wise”. Track first contact resolution beside it to see whether the fast replies settled anything.

Unanswered messages drop out. Help Scout calculates no response time for a conversation with no replies, and Intercom leaves out one closed without a reply. Leaving the hardest emails unanswered would improve the figure, so count the ones nobody answered as well.

Replies from outside the helpdesk don’t count. Gorgias ignores a reply sent straight from Gmail, and HubSpot’s ticket property doesn’t update when the reply comes from another inbox, such as Gmail or Outlook.

Office hours hide the nights. With office hours set, a message that arrives at midnight starts its clock the next morning, so a team that’s closed when most customers write in can still report a short wait.

First response time vs response time and resolution time

All four are lengths of time, and they’re easy to confuse.

The share of conversations that end solved is the resolution rate, a count rather than a time.

Replying in seconds with Deacon

The long waits in the example came from a Thursday night and a Saturday, when nobody was watching the inbox. Deacon answers your customers from your own docs in seconds, at any hour and in the language they write in, so a question your docs cover can get its answer whenever it’s asked. When your docs don’t cover it, Deacon says it doesn’t know instead of guessing, and asks for the visitor’s email.

You hear about the ones that need you within minutes. When a visitor leaves their email or asks for a person, the Deacon dashboard tells you straight away if anyone on your team has it open, and otherwise the owners get an email about it three minutes later. You reply from the dashboard, and if the visitor still has the chat open, your reply appears there under your name. Analytics › Widget keeps a count of everyone who left their email and hasn’t had a reply from you yet.

Each question you write an answer for only needs answering once. Every question your docs didn’t cover has an Answer this button, and Save & check shows you the reply Deacon now gives. Your answer becomes part of what Deacon knows, so the next person who asks can get it in seconds, and the more you answer, the less Deacon needs you.

It also shows you what people are asking. Topics group similar questions, count how many people asked and label most groups as a how-to, a feature ask, a bug report and so on. The biggest how-to groups are the answers to write first, and the feature asks tell you what customers want next.

There’s no first response time in the Deacon dashboard, since its own replies take seconds and the rest is how quickly you reply. Human handoff covers how conversations reach you, and you can try it all on the free plan, which needs no card.