The clock begins to run once your customer contacts you for assistance. It won't end until the customer receives a response they deem satisfactory. That clock, in essence, counts the "Time to Resolution," a standard customer service metric.

What Is Resolution Time?

A customer service statistic called "Time to Resolution" tracks the average amount of time between the creation of a customer interaction and the marking of that engagement as "resolved." MTTR or TTR stands for Mean Time to Resolution, Time to Resolution, or Time to Resolve.

Importance Of Resolution Time

• Time To Resolution is essential since your and customers' time is valuable. One aspect of providing good service is responding to a customer's question. 
• The consumer will nearly always be happier with the contact if they ask a question and receive an excellent response within a few hours rather than receiving an identical response a few days later.
• According to research, addressing problems quickly and effectively leads to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• TTR is a valuable abbreviation for the customer experience because it measures the time it takes to get an acceptable resolution (rather than just the time it takes to get any response back). A quick response that is incorrect or insufficient still results in a bad customer experience; thus, you should also measure first response times and waiting durations.
• You may better comprehend variations in your customers' experiences by keeping an eye on your TTR. For instance, it can: Assist you in identifying talks that are going on longer than usual or that might have been forgotten or lost.
• Varying teams, geographies, customer types, or product categories may have different TTR numbers for the same customer support team. Your comprehension of your consumers' journeys will improve as you track the changes in those metrics and compare them to one another.

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First Contact Resolution

The first contact resolution rate is the proportion of customer support tickets or requests successfully resolved following the customer's initial interaction.

This formula can be used to calculate the FCR rate:

Several tickets were resolved following the customer's initial contact / Total number of tickets resolved during the same time frame.

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Calculating Resolution Time

• TTR is, at least in theory, a straightforward formula that averages the start and end times of each customer service discussion over all conversations within a particular time frame.
• Any customer service software, though, will have quirks that can alter the average and make different contrasting systems more complex. 
• Should a conversation be considered "resolved" if it is ended without the client receiving a response, for instance? Or what if the consumer hasn't responded for days or weeks, and it's still shown as "pending"?

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Customer Expectation

Customers' past service interactions with you and other firms, for example, help to determine what they expect from future exchanges.

Customer expectations may depend on the below points.

• How difficult do they think their question is?
• The details you provide to them in your initial responses and on your contact pages.
• Whatever customer-specific service level agreements you may have in place.

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Benchmarking Time To Resolution

Without context, an objective, or a standard for your customer service KPIs, having a number is insufficient. You should consider the following factors while choosing your resolution time:

• What do consumers anticipate? How much work or effort is necessary to fix this problem? (This may not be realistic, but it's fundamental for them.) (Will it need to raise the issue to management or move it to another department for resolution?)
• How long does it take rivals to fix a problem like this? (Remember that your rivals can have more or fewer resources available.)
• You'll consider each of them when choosing the benchmark for your firm. Time to resolution can be calculated based on a department, a product, an agent, or any other number of variables. Then, you'll use this figure to provide your agent’s expectations and targets. Make sure to share these with your staff as well.

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Reducing Resolution Time

• Improved customer satisfaction is correlated, but only to a certain extent, with faster service and quicker resolution. Look at your TTR in the context of all your other priorities before digging in if you're already performing better than your consumers expect. There may be other areas to focus on that will significantly influence the customer experience.
• If you must act, the first thing to do is to identify how your time is being used. Saving a few minutes for a quicker first response won't significantly enhance the customer's experience if hours are lost when conversations are transferred to another team.
• It will probably require some physical labour to determine where the time goes: Go through your reports, examining the discussions that ended quickly, in about the normal amount of time, and those that ended very slowly.
• Most help desk systems will date various conversational exchanges, allowing you to construct a timeline of the conversation's development using those timestamps. While you may have a general idea of where time is being spent, the facts could still surprise you.
• Investigating 20 chats will usually show how the time utilization typically divides unless you have large volumes. List the areas where time is slipping away, and then arrange the list according to the biggest causes and most straightforward solutions.

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Additional Tips

• The default TTR value in your reports might not be the same as the mean or average overall.
• To view the response times during the hours your staff is working, and many customer care platforms provide Office Hours or Business Hours-type filters for reporting. That is a valuable technique to examine team performance without considering the impact of questions received at odd hours or on the weekends. But remember that a consumer must still wait for the total time.
• When comparing different inboxes, different customer kinds, or different support teams, you can also see a significant variation in TTR. An aggregate average may conceal extremely quick or extremely slow resolution times while still appearing entirely reasonable.
• Finally, there might be some talks included in your reporting that aren't really in need of "resolution." For instance, if your marketing staff uses your help desk solution to handle inbound PR inquiries, they may have ongoing dialogues pushing your TTR average up for weeks.
• Check your reporting tools to see if you can measure more precisely by excluding non-customer support interactions from your reports.

Conclusion

Customer satisfaction directly correlates with on-time resolution, making it a crucial indication. The more quickly the team can address client issues, the happier the customers are. Customers become anxious and dissatisfied if a case is not resolved quickly.

Resolutions are crucial because they give businesses a quick and efficient way to handle decisions that would otherwise take a lot of time. Additionally, it enables the shareholders and board of directors to hold the company's employees accountable and give necessary guidance when necessary.

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