What it means
A customer who reports a problem cares about one thing: when it will be fixed. First response time measures how quickly someone acknowledges the issue; time to resolution measures how long until the problem is gone.
A support operation can have excellent response times and terrible resolution times if agents reply quickly but cannot fix anything, hand issues between teams, or wait days for information. Resolution time is the measure that reflects the customer's actual experience.
The clock starts when the ticket is logged and stops when it is closed as resolved, and the definitions at each end matter. Some businesses stop the clock while waiting for the customer to respond; others include that time.
Some count a ticket resolved when the agent closes it; others only when the customer confirms, or when a reopening window has passed. The chosen definition should be applied consistently and stated alongside the figure, and the reopen rate should be reported with it, because tickets closed prematurely to improve the average will simply come back.
Resolution time varies enormously by issue type, so the overall average is a starting point only. Breaking it down by category (password resets in hours, billing disputes in days, product defects in weeks) shows where the long tail is and where investment pays.
The distribution also matters more than the mean: a support desk that resolves 90% of tickets in a day and 10% in a month has an average that describes neither group, and the customers in the 10% are the ones who leave. Median, 90th percentile and the share of tickets exceeding a target are more useful than the mean alone.
Reducing resolution time is a process problem more than a people problem. Giving front-line agents authority to resolve issues without escalation, building knowledge bases that answer the most common problems, ensuring specialist teams have service levels for escalated tickets, and fixing the product defects that generate repeat tickets all shorten the average sustainably.
Pressure on agents to close tickets faster mostly produces premature closures and reopens.
In practice
Real-world examples.
Example
A telecoms provider reports average time to resolution of 4 hours for service faults but 9 days for billing disputes, and targets the billing process for redesign.
Example
A managed IT services firm contracts to resolve priority-one incidents within 4 hours and priority-three requests within 5 business days, and reports performance against each.
Example
An e-commerce retailer measures resolution from complaint to refund or replacement received, not to the email that promises it, because that is when the customer's problem ends.
Think of it
“Resolution time is how long it takes to solve customer problems-speed of support.
Formula
Calculation
Average Time to Resolution = Sum of (Resolution Time minus Ticket Open Time) for tickets resolved in the period / Number of tickets resolved
Percentage resolved within target = Tickets resolved within the target time / Total tickets resolved x 100%
Reopen Rate = Tickets reopened after closure / Tickets closed x 100%
Worked example. A software company's support desk resolved 2,400 tickets in a month. Total resolution time across them was 43,200 hours.
- Average time to resolution = 43,200 / 2,400 = 18.0 hours
By category:
- Account and access issues: 1,200 tickets, average 3 hours (3,600 hours total)
- Billing questions: 600 tickets, average 12 hours (7,200 hours)
- Product defects and bugs: 400 tickets, average 60 hours (24,000 hours)
- Feature and configuration help: 200 tickets, average 42 hours (8,400 hours)
The 400 defect tickets, 17% of volume, account for 56% of total resolution time. The company's target is 24 hours; 2,050 tickets (85%) met it, and almost every miss was a defect or configuration ticket. The reopen rate was 6%, concentrated in billing.
Improvement plan: the engineering team commits to a 24-hour service level for support escalations (currently 48 to 72 hours of waiting inside the 60-hour defect average), and a knowledge base article is written for each of the ten most common configuration questions. If defect resolution falls to 36 hours and configuration to 24, total resolution time falls to 29,400 hours and the average to 12.3 hours, with the percentage within target rising to about 93%.Case study
Seen in the real world.
A financial software provider had an average time to resolution of 5.2 days and a customer satisfaction score that had fallen for three consecutive quarters, despite a first response time of under an hour that the support manager was proud of. A review of 500 long-running tickets found the same pattern repeatedly: the agent replied promptly, asked for information, waited, escalated to a specialist queue with no service level, waited again, and closed the ticket when the specialist eventually answered, often after the customer had found a workaround or complained to their account manager. The company set a 24-hour service level for the specialist queue, gave front-line agents access to the tools to resolve the 30 most common issues themselves, and started measuring resolution time from the customer's perspective, including all waiting.
Average time to resolution fell to 1.6 days within four months, satisfaction recovered, and churn among customers who had raised tickets, previously double the company average, fell to match it. The support manager's reflection was that the team had been optimising the one number customers did not care about.
Watch out
Common mistakes.
- Managing to first response time instead of resolution time. A fast acknowledgement of a problem that then takes a week to fix does not satisfy anyone.
- Reporting the mean alone. The long tail of slow resolutions is where customers are lost; report the distribution and the share exceeding target.
- Pressuring agents to close tickets quickly, which raises the reopen rate and hides the real resolution time.
Questions
People also ask.
What is a good average time to resolution?
It depends on the issue type and the customer's expectations: hours for access and simple queries, a day or two for billing, longer for defects requiring engineering. Set targets by category.
Should waiting-for-customer time be included?
Either convention is acceptable if applied consistently and disclosed. Excluding it measures the support team's own performance; including it measures the customer's experience.
How does time to resolution relate to first contact resolution?
First contact resolution measures whether the issue was solved in one interaction. Time to resolution measures how long it took overall. High first contact resolution usually produces low resolution times, but not always.
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