On the front lines of customer care, every second counts. When someone reaches out for help, they want answers fast. That’s where time to resolution (TTR) comes in.
TTR tracks how long it takes your team to resolve an issue from start to finish. It’s one of the most important metrics in customer care—it reflects the efficiency of your service and the ease of your customers’ experience. We’ve developed customer experience management solutions to drive consumer service with every interaction.
Why TTR Matters for Customer Care
Long wait times lead to frustrated customers as well as frustrated teams. A low TTR shows that your team, and the systems you’ve put around them, are efficient and effective.
Improving TTR helps you:
- Clear out backlogs
- Avoid repeat calls
- Build trust with every customer service resolution
Just remember: “Fast” alone isn’t enough. Your primary goal should be to improve the customer’s experience with your support service, TTR doesn’t tell the whole story about whether you’ve achieved that. A quick customer service “resolution” that doesn’t truly solve a customer’s problem will still leave them unsatisfied and lead to follow-up contacts. TTR is just one element in the full picture of how well you meet customers’needs.
How Do You Calculate Mean Time to Resolution?
Here’s how to measure your team’s mean time to resolution:
- Track the time from when a ticket is opened to when it’s closed.
- Add up the total time for all tickets over a week or month.
- Divide by the number of resolved tickets to find your average.
Example: If your team resolves 200 tickets in 1,600 business hours, your average TTR is 8 hours.
Most teams calculate this in business hours—excluding evenings and weekends.
What Influences Your Team’s TTR?
Several real-world factors affect how quickly your team can solve an issue:
- Complexity of the problem
- Agent knowledge and experience
- Ticket routing accuracy
- Tools and resources available
- Internal processes and workflows
- Effectiveness of the communication process
How to Lower TTR Without Burning Out Your Team
Here are some practical ways to bring down TTR and reduce stress on your agents:
- Automate repetitive, low-value tasks
- Use AI to route tickets to the right people, right away
- Make data easy to access during calls or chats
- Flag urgent issues early
- Improve internal documentation and knowledge sharing
Tools That Make the Job Easier
Offering live assistance from a knowledgeable staff member can make your customers feel heard. A live agent can troubleshoot their query or redirect them in real time.
However, customer support staff members are only available for so many hours a day. Modern technology has given consumers more ways to communicate with businesses. You can set your customer care teams up for success with solutions that extend their reach, automate routine interactions, and ensure customers still feel supported even when a live agent isn’t available.
Look into:
- Self-service knowledge bases for customers
- Intent based routing systems
- In-app guides and messaging
- AI-powered chatbots
- Smart interactive voice response (IVR) systems
- Customer feedback surveys to improve service over time
TTR Is Just One Piece of the Puzzle
TTR is critical, but it’s not the only number that matters. Combine it with other metrics to get a full view of customer care performance:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): How likely is the customer to recommend you?
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): How happy was the customer with the interaction?
- Customer Effort Score (CES): How easy did you make it for them?
- Retention Rate (RR): Are your customers sticking around?
- Consumer Lifetime Value (CLV): What’s the long-term impact of a great service experience?
CSG Xponent isn’t just about resolving tickets faster—it’s about understanding what’s getting in the way of great customer experiences and fixing it at the root.
Our modular platform helps you:
- Pinpoint CX friction points across journeys with advanced analytics
- Trigger real-time actions to reduce effort and increase satisfaction
- Automate and personalize responses with AI-powered agents
- Optimize communication workflows across voice, SMS, chat and email
Xponent connects the dots between data, behavior and engagement. With it, you’re not just responding faster, you’re responding smarter. Let’s find and fix the cracks in your customer experience—before they cost you.
