Do You Know the Hidden Cost of AHT?

As we all know, small reductions in Average Handling Time (AHT) can create significant capacity savings – but what’s less understood is the true impact on the customer experience.

To find out more, we asked Danny Wareham to put the spotlight on the hidden cost of AHT and unpick how optimization of this widely-used metric can often undermine trust, empathy, and long-term customer relationships.

The Skill Is in Understanding How Much Time Is Required for the Desired Outcome

The village baker knew exactly how long a loaf should take. Not because he carried a stopwatch. Not because somebody had calculated the optimum production rate. Simply because years of practice had taught him that dough has its own pace.

Too little time and the loaf emerges dense and underdeveloped. Too much time and it collapses under its own weight. The skill was never in making the process as fast as possible. The skill was in understanding how much time was required for the desired outcome.

Time Is Visible – Outcomes Are Not

Modern organizations often struggle with this distinction. After all, time is visible – outcomes are not.

Quite simply, time can be measured to the second. Trust, understanding, reassurance, confidence, and loyalty cannot. Faced with that imbalance, organizations naturally gravitate towards what is easiest to count.

We measure the duration of activities and, over time, begin to assume that shorter durations represent better performance.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the contact centre.

Average Handling Time has been one of the dominant operational metrics for decades. The rationale is understandable. Contact centres process thousands, sometimes millions, of customer interactions every year.

Small reductions in average call duration can create significant capacity savings. AHT offers leaders a simple way to understand how efficiently customer demand is being managed.

For effective ideas on how to prove that “faster doesn’t always mean better”, read our article: How to Prove “Faster Doesn’t Always Mean Better”

People Adapt Their Behaviour in Response to the Metrics Used to Evaluate Them

At a contact centre level, this remains perfectly reasonable. The difficulty begins when a measure designed to describe the performance of a system becomes a target for the individuals working within it.

Psychologists have long understood that people adapt their behaviour in response to the metrics used to evaluate them.

Whether through goal-setting theory, reinforcement principles, or the broader effects of performance management systems, the outcome is remarkably consistent. What gets measured captures attention. What captures attention influences behaviour.

The advisor who knows their handling time is being monitored does not simply answer customer queries. They answer customer queries while carrying an awareness of the clock.

Most of the time, this awareness remains subtle. It appears in small decisions rather than dramatic ones. An opportunity to probe further is ignored.

A conversation is guided towards closure slightly earlier than it otherwise might have been. A customer receives an answer but not necessarily the confidence that accompanies genuine understanding.

None of these moments appear significant in isolation. Yet customer relationships are not built through isolated moments. They are built through the accumulation of experiences, impressions, and interpretations. And interpretation is where the psychology becomes interesting.

To help close the gap between short-term targets and long-term value, read our article: Start Aligning Your Metrics With Long-Term Value

Customers Call Humans for Social Confirmation – Not Information

If customers simply wanted information, most contact centres would have disappeared years ago. Websites, FAQs, chatbots, knowledge bases, and AI assistants are increasingly capable of answering straightforward questions.

The interactions that continue to reach advisors often involve something more complex. Sometimes the complexity lies in the problem itself. More often, the customer may already suspect what the answer is. What they are seeking is confirmation.

They may have found the relevant policy online; they are seeking reassurance that they have interpreted it correctly. They may understand the process; they are seeking confidence that the process will actually work.

Psychologists have long recognized that uncertainty carries an emotional burden. Human beings are remarkably uncomfortable when outcomes feel ambiguous or unpredictable. In these situations, information alone is often insufficient. People seek social confirmation. They look for cues that reduce doubt and increase confidence in their understanding of a situation.

This is one of the reasons human interaction remains valuable despite continual advances in self-service technology. It’s why voice continues to be the channel of choice for contact centres. The advisor does not simply provide answers. They help customers make sense of answers.

For expert tips on giving your voice channel some well-deserved care and attention, read our article: 5 Ways to Take Better Care of Your Voice Channel

This Creates an Uncomfortable Tension With Individual Handling Time Targets

Yet sensemaking requires curiosity. It requires listening. It requires enough space for a customer to explain not only what has happened but why it matters to them.

This creates an uncomfortable tension with individual handling time targets. The customer experiences the conversation as a process of understanding, whilst the advisor experiences the conversation as a process that is being measured.

Most of the time, neither party consciously recognizes this tension. Nevertheless, it still shapes the interaction.

Completion Is Not the Same as Resolution

Operationally, the calls appear different. Psychologically, they may be worlds apart.

Contact centres naturally measure what happens during the interaction. Customers often evaluate what happens afterwards.

The memory of a service experience is not created solely by the outcome. It is influenced by how understood, respected, and supported the customer felt throughout the interaction. Two customers may receive identical solutions while leaving with very different impressions of the organization behind them.

Trust Develops Through Small Signals That Suggest Competence

This distinction becomes particularly important when trust is involved.

Trust develops through small signals that suggest competence, attention, and genuine interest – rather than through grand gestures.

The advisor who takes time to explore an issue communicates something that extends beyond the immediate problem. They communicate that the organization is willing to invest effort in understanding the customer.

The advisor who appears rushed may unintentionally communicate the opposite. The customer is unlikely to think “the organization is managing average handling time targets.”

Instead, they may conclude that the organization is not particularly interested in them. Whether that conclusion is fair is almost beside the point. Customer relationships are shaped by perception as much as reality.

If you want more advice on earning (and keeping) customer trust, read our article: 10 Essential Building Blocks for Earning Customer Trust

What’s the Problem When Efficiency Becomes the Goal?

There is an old observation in organizational psychology that people rarely respond to metrics themselves. They respond to the behaviours that those metrics encourage.

Few advisors begin their careers wanting to rush customers. Most enter customer service because they enjoy helping people solve problems. They derive satisfaction from being useful, knowledgeable, and supportive. These motivations are not accidental. They are often precisely the qualities organizations seek during recruitment.

Yet performance measures exert a powerful influence on behaviour – including handling time. When advisors know they are being evaluated against handling time, every conversation acquires a second objective. Alongside helping the customer, there is a need to manage the clock.

This does not usually result in obviously poor service. Experienced advisors become remarkably skilled at balancing competing demands.

Over hundreds of interactions, these decisions accumulate.

Once a Measure Becomes a Target, It Ceases to Be a Good Measure

Economist Charles Goodhart captured this phenomenon decades ago when he observed that once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

The insight has become known as Goodhart’s Law, and it highlights a challenge familiar to many contact centres: metrics that are useful for understanding system performance can become problematic when used to drive individual behaviour.

At a contact centre level, AHT can highlight process inefficiencies, knowledge gaps, training needs and operational bottlenecks. It helps leaders understand how demand flows through the system. At an individual level, however, the metric can encourage advisors to optimize for speed rather than effectiveness.

The irony is that effectiveness is often what ultimately drives efficiency. Customers who leave a conversation with genuine confidence are less likely to call back, escalate complaints, or seek clarification through alternative channels.

A shorter call is not always a cheaper call if it creates additional work tomorrow! This challenge may become even more significant over the next decade. Not because handling time will disappear, but because the nature of the interactions reaching human advisors is changing.

What Does the Future of AHT Look Like?

Perhaps the future of AHT becomes most interesting when viewed alongside the rise of automation and artificial intelligence.

For years, contact centres have pursued efficiency by attempting to reduce the duration of human interactions. Today, technology offers a different route. Increasingly capable self-service tools can absorb many of the straightforward enquiries that once consumed advisor time.

The question is what organizations choose to do with the capacity that creates.

One option is to view every minute saved as an opportunity for further cost reduction. Another is to recognize that the interactions reaching human advisors are changing.

As routine transactions migrate towards automation, the conversations that remain often involve greater uncertainty, greater complexity, and greater emotional significance. They are less about information and more about interpretation.

In this environment, the advisor role becomes less of a processor and more of a guide. The advisor becomes a source of confidence rather than purely a source of information. Another way to view this is that the role is less about transactions and more about trust.

If that is true, then perhaps the objective is not to make every conversation shorter. Perhaps it is to give advisors sufficient freedom to exercise judgement about how much time a conversation genuinely requires.

This does not mean abandoning efficiency. It means recognizing that efficiency and effectiveness are not always the same thing.

The most successful contact centres may ultimately be those that use automation to remove unnecessary human effort while preserving space for meaningful human connection.

Written by: Danny Wareham, Founder & Director of Firgun

If you are looking for more information on Average Handling Time in the contact centre, read these articles next:

• Why You Should Embrace the Complexity of Longer Talk Time
• 16 Ways to Reduce AHT – Without Damaging the Customer Experience
• How to Safely Lower Average Handling Time

Author: Danny Wareham
Reviewed by: Jo Robinson