Average handle time: Is it costing you money?

One rep is on the phone with a customer for 20 minutes. Another rep wraps a call about a similar issue in 90 seconds. But there are repeat contacts for the same issue. Your instinct tells you the same issue should take your reps roughly the same amount of time to solve, but that’s not happening. Could it be a talkative customer? Or an undertrained employee? 

Without a concrete number to point to, it’s hard to know where the problem is. 

That number is average handle time. Calculating it is the first step toward spotting patterns that quietly drain your team’s time and your customers’ patience. On its own, the number isn’t good or bad. It’s a starting point — a way to spot which reps, calls, or issue types deserve a closer look. 

This guide covers what average handle time means, how to calculate it, why it matters, and how to improve it.

What is Average Handle Time? 

Average handle time, or AHT, is the average amount of time it takes your team to fully handle a customer interaction. You start tracking it from the moment the interaction starts to the moment your team finishes all the work tied to it. This includes any wrap-up after the call or conversation ends. 

Calculating AHT tells you how long the entire call handling process takes. Plus, it shows how efficiently your team moves through interactions.

AHT also helps you determine how much of a rep’s time one interaction costs. That way, you can make better decisions about your staffing needs and budgeting. 

Average handle time started as a call center KPI. It was created to measure call center agent performance. But businesses can, and should, also use this metric to understand how their team is handling communication.

How do you calculate average handle time?

The average handle time formula is straightforward. To find out how to calculate average handle time, you need three metrics for a given period:

• Total talk time, or the time spent on the interaction.
• Total hold time, or the time the customer spent waiting or on call transfers. 
• Total after-call work or follow-up time. ACW includes wrap-up tasks like notes, follow-up emails, or updating a ticket.

Once you have those, plug the numbers into this formula:

The same logic extends to non-call channels. You divide the total time spent resolving a request by the number of interactions handled. 

Let’s put this into practice.

Average handle time calculation example

Say a small team handled 200 calls last month and their time breakdown was: 

• Total talk time: 1,200 minutes
• Total hold time: 200 minutes
• Total after-call work: 400 minutes

Plug those into the formula, and the AHT is 9 minutes:

(1,200 + 200 + 400) ÷ 200 = 9 minutes

That number becomes the baseline they can track over time. They can compare team or individual rep performance to spot outliers. 

Why does average handle time matter for businesses?

Here’s what calculating your AHT does for your business:

• Higher customer satisfaction. A high AHT can mean long waits and unresolved issues. A low one can mean customers feel rushed off the phone before their problem’s fixed. Both extremes hurt the customer experience and lead to higher customer churn. 
• Lower operational costs and improved efficiency. A lower AHT means your existing team can handle more calls without adding headcount. This lowers your cost per interaction. 
• More targeted coaching. A rep who’s consistently well above or below the team average is worth a closer look. It might point to a skills gap or to someone rushing calls because they’re busy with other tasks.
• Easier staffing and capacity planning. Knowing your AHT helps you estimate how many people you’ll‌ need to cover expected call, text, and email volume. No more following gut instincts when it comes to hiring and scheduling.

7 Ways to improve Average Handle Time 

Here are seven simple ways to improve the time your team spends handling communications: 

1. Measure your average handle time to get your baseline

Before you can bring average handle time into a healthy range, you need to know where it stands today. It’s tempting to jump straight to fixes like better scripts or more training. But without a baseline, you have no way to tell whether those changes are working.

The good news is you don’t need new software to get this number. Most business phone systems already track the data you need. It’s just a matter of knowing where to look.

Take Quo, for example. Inside Quo Analytics, you can view metrics like total incoming and outgoing calls and time on call. That gives you a clear, current picture of how long your team is ‌spending on each interaction. 

Once you’ve got the numbers pulled up in Quo Analytics, you can export them as a CSV. From there, you can calculate AHT using the formula.

💡Pro tip: Is your business on a Claude Team or Pro plan? You can connect to Claude using Quo’s Claude connector. From there, you can use Claude to help calculate average handle time at scale using natural language. Rather than exporting a CSV yourself, you can ask Claude to pull call insights and surface handle-time patterns. 

2. Give reps full customer context before the call starts

A large share of AHT goes toward reps re-asking questions the business already has answers to. Across hundreds of calls, that adds up to a meaningful chunk of your AHT.

The fix is about technology and habit. Every time a rep learns something new about a customer or lead, they should log it in your phone system or CRM. And just as important, reps need to ‌check that information before and during the call.

In Quo, there are two ways to build that context:

• Contact notes give reps a place to log details from conversations. It’s a freeform hub to record details like past requests and preferences. 
• Custom properties are more structured. Set up fields for things like customer type, service history, or plan details. That way, a rep can see the essentials at a glance without digging through notes.

If you use a CRM, take this a step further with CRM sync. Connecting Quo to a tool like HubSpot or Jobber auto-syncs call summaries and context between systems. This means reps aren’t stuck copying notes back and forth or switching tabs mid-call to check a customer’s history.

3. Have an internal knowledge base for reps

Plenty of the inquiries reps field come from the same handful of questions. When a rep doesn’t have a quick answer on hand, the call stalls. They may even put the customer on hold to track down a teammate or dig through old emails, and that hold time gets baked straight into your AHT.

Internal knowledge management takes care of this. Build out a reference document with answers to your most common questions. This could cover things like appointment rescheduling or your pricing tiers. Make it easily available so reps can answer on the spot instead of pausing the call to find out. This is especially valuable for newer team members, who won’t yet have those answers memorized and may have to lean on more experienced reps.

4. Route calls to the right person the first time 

Beyond wasting time, misrouted calls frustrate customers. If a call routes to  someone who can’t‌ help, it might have to be transferred, which extends the call. Or the rep has to scramble to find an answer they’re not equipped to give. An unclear escalation path makes this worse, since reps may not be sure who to loop in or how.

There are a few ways to fix this at the call routing level:

• Business-hours routing. Send calls down a different path based on whether they come in during business hours or after. This keeps a call from landing with someone who isn’t available to help.
• An IVR, or Interactive Voice Response, menu. This is a self-service option that lets callers route themselves to the right person or department. That cuts down on transfers before the call even reaches a rep.
• Ring groups. Once calls are routed, ring groups control how they’re distributed among your team. For example, you could choose to ring your senior reps first if the caller is calling with a billing issue. Or, for the fastest possible response, you can have everyone in a group ring simultaneously.

On Quo, you can set this up with a drag-and-drop visual call flow builder. It’s a tool that makes it easier to map out routing, hours, and ring groups without technical support.

5. Have a call control strategy for difficult or escalated calls 

Staying on the phone with an upset customer because of an issue you don’t have the authority or ability to resolve just extends the call. It can also leave the customer even more frustrated than when they started.

If it’s clear you’re not going to resolve the issue on the call, employ de-escalation techniques to cool things down. Then ensure you have the key details and get the caller to the right person or set up a callback.

When you do hand the call off, use a warm transfer rather than a cold one. This means looping in the next person with context on who’s calling and what’s already been discussed. That way, they can hit the ground running.

💡For more tips on handling tough conversations, check out our guide to dealing with challenging customers. 

6. Use artificial intelligence to capture context and speed up callbacks

When nobody’s available to pick up, what matters is capturing enough detail that the callback can resolve things quickly. A callback where the customer has to explain everything all over again increases AHT and frustrates your customer.

This is where an AI voice agent like Sona comes in. Instead of the customer going to voicemail, Sona captures the message and automatically generates a call summary. When a rep needs to call the customer back, they have the context they need. For example, they’ll know what the caller wanted, their name and contact information, and any other details mentioned along the way. That allows them to get more done during the callback without starting over. 

7. Train and coach reps using call recordings and transcripts

Reviewing call recordings and transcripts is one of the best ways to see where calls are getting stuck. Call listening can show you why your AHT is too long or too short and whether there’s a knowledge gap, an unclear process, or a specific rep in need of coaching. 

To make this easier, you can ask Claude to calculate AHT per rep and flag any outliers. Here’s a prompt example you could try: 

“Pull my calls from [business number] from the last 30 days and calculate my average handle time. Break it down by team member and point out any outliers, meaning reps or calls that are noticeably higher or lower than the average.” If you assign some reps to more complicated calls on purpose, make sure to let Claude know. That allows you to account for unique situations rather than flagging reps unfairly.

From there, use what you find to guide your coaching. Some reps might need a quick knowledge refresher, while others may require more targeted one-on-one mentoring.

💡For more on building out a coaching approach, check out our manager’s guide to customer service coaching.

Is there an industry benchmark for a good average handle time score?

Some industries do publish AHT benchmarks. So it’s fair to ask whether you should aim for one of those numbers.

For example, customer service contact centers usually have an average handle time of about 10 minutes. Retail companies are closer to five minutes. Business, IT, and financial services companies often take under five minutes. 

The trouble is, these numbers may not be a useful target for a small or growing service business. Benchmarks like these vary wildly by industry, issue complexity, and channel mix. A six-minute average for retail chatbots doesn’t reveal much about your own team’s phone consultations. 

Chasing a number that has nothing to do with your business can backfire. Reps start optimizing to hit the target instead of resolving the customer’s issue.

Once you’ve got your own baseline, the more useful exercise is finding your outliers. Which reps or calls fall well outside your baseline in either direction and why? That’s where you’ll find the fixable problems that are relevant to your business.

Track it, then fix it: Making AHT improvement stick with Quo

Average handle time is a metric worth keeping an eye on. That’s why you need to run consistent call audits. Otherwise, it’s hard to know how efficiently your team is‌ serving people from day to day. But measuring it is only half the job. The other half is having the tools to do something about what you find.

That’s really what a good business phone system should offer — the data to calculate your number and the tools to act once you know it. Quo does both. With Quo, you get: 

• Analytics to establish your baseline 
• Contact notes and custom properties so reps have context for every call
• A visual call flow builder to route callers to the right person the first time
• Call recordings and transcripts you can use to coach your team based on what’s happening on your calls

Ready to see how a phone system can bring your AHT into a healthier range? Try Quo for free for seven days.

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