FRT: First Response Time

FRT (First Response Time) is the time between a customer submitting a request (a ticket, email, chat or social message) and receiving the first reply from your support team. Teams report it as an average or a median across requests to show how long customers wait before anyone answers.

Outside customer service, FRT can mean facial recognition technology or, in US firearms regulation, a forced reset trigger. This page covers the support metric.

How to calculate FRT

For one request:

FRT = time of the first reply − time the request was submitted

For a team or a period:

Average FRT = sum of first response times ÷ number of requests that received a reply

Example: six emails arrived on Monday. They got their first replies after 5 minutes, 12 minutes, 20 minutes, 45 minutes, 2 hours and 9 hours (the last one arrived in the evening).

• Average FRT: (5 + 12 + 20 + 45 + 120 + 540) ÷ 6 = 742 ÷ 6 ≈ 124 minutes, or about 2 hours.
• Median FRT: (20 + 45) ÷ 2 = 32.5 minutes.

Half the customers waited about half an hour or less, but one overnight email pulls the average up to two hours. That is why teams report the median and the 90th percentile (the wait that 90% of customers didn't exceed) next to the average.

Business hours change the number too. A ticket submitted at 17:40 and answered at 09:15 the next morning waited 15 hours 35 minutes in calendar time. With business hours from 09:00 to 18:00, it waited 35 minutes.

Definitions to fix before you report FRT

• Auto-replies. An automatic "We got your message" is not a first response. Count the first reply from a person, or track automated and human replies separately.
• Meaningful reply. Some teams count only a reply that moves the case forward: an answer, a next step or a specific question.
• Calendar or business hours. Calendar time shows what customers experience; business hours are fairer for judging staffing.
• Which requests count. Exclude spam, duplicates and tickets your team opened itself.

FRT vs TTR vs FCR

A fast FRT with a slow TTR means customers hear back quickly but wait a long time for the fix. A strong FCR with a slow FRT means good answers that arrive late.

How to interpret FRT

• Set targets per channel. Customers expect a chat reply within minutes and an email reply within hours, so one target for all channels misleads.
• Use your own promises as the benchmark: the reply times stated on your site or in your service agreements, and the share of requests that met them.
• Read FRT next to volume. FRT usually rises first when requests outgrow staffing, so a rising trend is an early capacity warning.
• Look at the slowest 10%. They are the customers most likely to complain or leave.

Common mistakes

• Counting auto-replies, which makes FRT look excellent while customers still wait.
• Reporting only the average.
• Mixing channels into one number.
• Rewarding speed alone. Agents learn to send empty acknowledgments that improve FRT and annoy customers.
• Silently using business hours in one report and calendar hours in another.

How to improve FRT

• Route requests on arrival by topic and priority so they reach someone who can answer.
• Staff for real demand: if FRT spikes at the same hours every day, adjust shifts.
• Prepare macros and a knowledge base for frequent questions.
• Set expectations in the auto-reply ("We reply within 4 business hours") and include self-help links.
• Collect key details in the request form so the first reply can be a real answer rather than a question.

How to connect FRT to satisfaction with a survey

FRT comes from your help desk. A short survey after the case shows how much the wait mattered to customers:

1. Ask a customer satisfaction (CSS) question about the interaction, and optionally "How satisfied were you with how quickly we first responded?"
2. Pass the ticket ID, channel and first response time into the survey link as hidden variables (from the Basic plan).
3. Compare satisfaction across FRT bands, such as under 1 hour, 1–4 hours and over 4 hours, to find the point where satisfaction starts to drop for your customers.

The CSAT calculator gives the satisfied share for each band from the answer counts.