What Is Average Handle Time (AHT) and How to Improve It

What’s really driving up your Average Handle Time? Richard Higginbotham from Netcall looks at where contact centres can improve efficiency, without sacrificing customer experience.

Average handle time is one of the most widely used measures of contact centre performance. It tells you how long, on average, it takes a team member to handle a customer interaction from beginning to end.

But shorter isn’t automatically better.

Reducing AHT by rushing interactions can create repeat contacts, frustrated customers and additional work further down the line.

The more useful question is what’s making interactions take longer than they need to – and what can you remove without compromising customer experience?

From AI-powered support for human agents and automated summaries to better routing and easier access to information, there are now more ways to tackle the causes of high AHT rather than simply putting pressure on the team to work faster.

What is Average Handle Time (AHT)?

Average handle time (AHT) measures the average amount of time required to complete a customer interaction. 

For a voice interaction, this typically includes:

• Talk time
• Time spent on hold
• Transfer or conference time, where applicable
• After-call work or wrap-up time

In other words, the AHT meaning goes beyond the length of the conversation itself. It measures the time your contact centre spends handling an interaction, including the work required immediately afterwards.

The term average handling time is used interchangeably with average handle time. If you’re wondering what AHT means in contact centre reporting, both terms generally refer to this same measure of handling time.

AHT began as a voice metric, but modern contact centres increasingly apply the same principle across digital interactions too.

However, digital channels need to be measured with more care.

A live chat, email or messaging conversation may not map neatly to “talk time plus wrap-up”, especially where contact centre staff handle multiple conversations at once or where the customer responds asynchronously.

Because of this, AHT remains highly relevant, but it should be interpreted alongside channel-specific measures such as response time, resolution time, containment, first contact resolution and customer satisfaction.

How is Average Handle Time Calculated?

For voice interactions, the traditional AHT formula is:

AHT = (total talk time + total hold time + total after-call work) ÷ total number of handled interactions

For example, imagine your team spend:

• 1,000 minutes talking to customers
• 200 minutes with customers on hold
• 300 minutes completing after-call work
• Across 300 interactions

Your calculation would be: 

(1,000 + 200 + 300) ÷ 300 = 5 minutes 

Your average handle time would therefore be 5 minutes. 

For digital channels, the principle is similar – understanding how much handling time an interaction requires – but the calculation needs to reflect the channel.

For example, for live chat, concurrent conversations can make elapsed interaction time very different from the time a human agent is actively working on each conversation. Email and messaging may also have long gaps while waiting for a customer response.

“Rather than forcing every channel into one calculation, establish a consistent measure for each channel and compare like with like. If you’re comparing AHT between teams, channels or periods, make sure you’re measuring the same components each time.” – Richard Higginbotham, Product Marketing, Netcall.

Why is AHT Important in a Contact Centre?

AHT provides an indication of how efficiently interactions are being handled. 

This means it can help contact centre leaders understand:

• How much team member capacity different types of enquiries require
• Whether processes are creating unnecessary delays
• Where staff may need additional training or support
• How much time is being spent on after-call administration
• Staffing and workforce requirements
• Whether changes to processes or technology are having an impact

And AHT is particularly useful when tracked over time or segmented by enquiry type. 

If one process suddenly takes considerably longer than similar interactions, for example, that can point towards a problem worth investigating.

“For organisations looking at AHT call centre performance, it’s important to understand what’s driving the number rather than treating it as a standalone measure of team member performance.” – Richard Higginbotham, Product Marketing, Netcall.

What is a Good Average Handle Time?

The fact is, there isn’t a single ideal AHT for every contact centre. 

A simple enquiry may take a few minutes. A complex financial, healthcare or public service interaction could legitimately take much longer. 

The channel also makes a difference: What constitutes an efficient live chat will not necessarily look the same as an efficient voice call or email interaction. 

That’s why chasing an industry benchmark can be misleading. 

Instead, establish your own baseline and look at AHT alongside the type and complexity of interactions being handled. 

And most importantly, don’t assume that lower is always better. A very low AHT could mean that call centre staff are resolving enquiries efficiently, but it could also indicate that conversations are being rushed. 

The objective should therefore be to reduce avoidable handling time, not simply shorten every conversation.

What Causes High AHT?

If AHT in a contact centre is increasing, the human agent isn’t necessarily the problem. 

Long handling times can be caused by the way work is designed around them.

Disconnected Systems

Sometimes, staff may need to move between CRM, case management, telephony, knowledge bases and other applications to piece together the information they need. 

Every switch adds time and makes it harder for customer service team members to maintain the flow of a conversation.

Poor Access to Information

Even when the answer exists somewhere, finding it can take time. 

Staff may need to search knowledge bases, ask colleagues or put customers on hold while they look for information.

Manual After-Call Work

Writing notes, categorising interactions and updating records can add significant time after the customer has left the conversation.

Complex Routing

Customers transferred between teams may have to explain their situation repeatedly, increasing both handling time and customer effort.

Insufficient Training and Guidance

Human agents who aren’t confident in a process or don’t have easy access to guidance naturally take longer to resolve enquiries.

Increasingly Complex Contacts

Successful self-service can remove simple enquiries from the queue, leaving staff to handle a greater proportion of complex cases. 

A rising AHT isn’t therefore always evidence of declining performance.

How to Improve Average Handle Time

Improving AHT isn’t about telling the team to work faster. Start by identifying where time is being lost, then look at how processes, technology and automation can remove that effort.

1. Use AI to Support Human Agents During and After Interactions

One of the biggest opportunities is to reduce the time team members spend searching for information and completing repetitive administration.

AI Agent Assist can retrieve relevant knowledge and provide guidance while an interaction is taking place, helping human agents find the information they need without putting customers on hold or searching across multiple sources.

AI-generated summaries can also capture key details from conversations automatically, reducing manual note-taking and after-contact work.

This is where AI can have a practical impact on AHT: not by pushing staff to finish the conversation sooner, but by removing some of the work surrounding it.

2. Give Contact Centre Staff a Unified Workspace

Constantly switching between applications slows interactions down.

Instead, bringing customer information, interaction history and communication tools into a unified agent workspace gives team members the context they need without requiring them to search across multiple systems.

3. Improve Routing

Getting customers to the right person first time reduces transfers and repeated conversations.

Intelligent routing can use information about the interaction, customer, human agent skills and priorities to direct enquiries more effectively.

Look at your transfer rates alongside AHT. If particular enquiry types are regularly moving between queues or teams, the routing itself may be contributing to longer handling times.

4. Make Knowledge Easier to Find

Customer service staff shouldn’t need to memorise every policy, process or product.

A well-maintained knowledge base makes information easier to access. AI Agent Assist can go further by retrieving relevant information and providing guidance while the interaction is happening.

So, review the enquiries with the longest handling times and ask whether the team can quickly access the information needed to resolve them.

If the answer exists but takes several minutes to find, improving knowledge access may deliver more value than focusing on the AHT target itself.

5. Reduce After-Call Work

After-call work is an important part of AHT and a major opportunity for automation.

AI-generated summaries can capture key details from conversations automatically, reducing the amount of manual note-taking required once the interaction ends.

Breaking AHT down into conversation, hold and after-call time can help pinpoint whether this is where the biggest opportunity lies.

6. Use Self-Service Appropriately

Not every enquiry requires a human agent.

AI Virtual Assistants can handle suitable routine enquiries across voice and digital channels, allowing customers to get help without joining a human agent queue.

Then, when a person is needed, the interaction should move smoothly to a member of the team with the relevant context.

This can also change the AHT picture. As straightforward interactions move to self-service, contact centre staff may handle a greater proportion of complex enquiries. AHT could increase even though the overall operation has become more efficient.

7. Match Resources to Demand

But AHT is only one part of contact centre efficiency.

Workforce management can help teams forecast demand and schedule resources accordingly. Having the right people available at the right times can reduce pressure on team members and help maintain service levels during peaks in demand.

Segmenting AHT by time, channel and enquiry type can also help identify where additional resource or different skills are needed.

8. Find Out Where the Time is Actually Going

A single AHT figure won’t tell you what needs fixing. Break it down.

Look at interaction types, transfers, hold time and after-contact work to understand where the time is being spent.

For example:

• How much team member capacity different types of enquiries require
• High transfer rates may indicate routing or ownership problems
• High after-contact work may highlight an opportunity for automation
• Long handling times for one enquiry type may point to an inefficient underlying process
• Differences between team members may highlight where additional guidance or coaching would help.

This is also where interaction and speech analytics can help. Looking at the conversations behind the metric can reveal recurring reasons for contact, process friction and patterns that an overall AHT figure won’t show you.

That turns AHT from a performance score into a tool for continuous improvement.

Why AHT Should Never be Viewed in Isolation

Average handle time tells you how long interactions take. It doesn’t tell you whether the customer got the right answer.

That’s why AHT works best alongside other contact centre metrics, including:

• First contact resolution
• Customer satisfaction
• Abandonment rate
• Average speed of answer
• Service level
• Repeat contact rate

If AHT falls but repeat contacts rise, for example, the apparent efficiency gain may simply have moved work somewhere else.

Equally, if AHT increases while first contact resolution and customer satisfaction improve, that may indicate customer service staff are spending more time resolving complex enquiries properly.

The strongest contact centres therefore focus less on making every interaction short and more on making every interaction effective.

“Use AHT to find friction, not simply to measure speed. By understanding where handling time is being spent and removing unnecessary effort around the interaction, you can improve efficiency without asking the team to rush the people they’re there to help.” – Richard Higginbotham, Product Marketing, Netcall

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This post has been re-published by kind permission of Netcall - view the original article.

Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.