7 Ways To Improve Your Customer Service Response Times
Sarah’s trying to log in to her account before an important client call, but she’s locked out. She tries to chat with support at 9:02 a.m., hoping for a quick fix. No one’s available, so she sends an email at 9:12 a.m. By 10:15 a.m., she’s frantic and she calls your support line.
What started as a simple login issue has now ruined her entire morning, turning a loyal customer into someone starting to wonder if your company really cares about her success.
Sound familiar? It’s a common story in customer support. If your team has been struggling with maintaining good customer service response times, you’re definitely not alone.
The good news is that there are plenty of practical approaches you can take to improve your response times and give your customers faster, better service.
What is response time in customer service?
Customer service response time is the length of time between a customer’s message to you and your team’s response. There are two primary response time metrics that support teams measure: first response time (FRT) and next response time (NRT).
Support teams typically measure their average first response time to understand how quickly they’re providing initial help to customers. As you would expect from the name, FRT specifically tracks your first response to a customer’s message, usually omitting any auto-responder replies.
First response time gets a lot of attention, but it’s not the only response time metric you should keep an eye on. Next response time may be just as important. NRT tracks your team’s average reply time to all the follow-up messages in an ongoing conversation.
Paying attention to NRT is vitally important for a good customer experience.
Think about it: If you respond to Sarah’s initial email in two minutes but then ghost her for six hours when she asks a clarifying question, you’ve essentially undone all the good of your quick first response.
Why is response time an important metric for support teams?
We live in an on-demand, instant-everything world (thanks, Netflix and DoorDash?). Customers today — no matter what industry you’re in — often expect near-immediate gratification. When you can’t deliver that, frustration levels start to go up.
Data backs this up: HubSpot’s research found that 90% of customers say an “immediate” response is essential or very important when they have a customer service question, and 60% of customers define “immediate” as 10 minutes or less.
Is this just customers being unreasonable? I don’t think so, because it’s not just about arbitrary expectations.
Consider what a long response time does to your customers: When a customer reaches out for customer service, they’re stuck. They have a question they can’t answer, they’re encountering a technical issue, or there’s some kind of problem that’s preventing them from doing their job or using their product.
Every hour they wait is another hour of frustration, lost productivity, wasted time, and eroded trust in your company. When those are the stakes, it’s crystal clear that every customer service team should be tracking response time. It’s one of the clearest indicators of whether you’re truly putting customers first.
First response time benchmarks for different support channels
Customer expectations around first response times can vary wildly, but it‘s useful to think about them by channel. I’ve often found it helpful to assess response time against an aspirational “best in class” goal and a baseline of “good enough” — because while we all want to deliver best in class experiences for our customers, budget and resource constraints are real things.
Here are some first response time benchmarks to help you gauge where you stand today, but keep in mind that factors like your industry, customer demographics, and product or service will all influence your customers’ expectations:
| Channel | Best In Class | Good Enough |
|---|---|---|
1 hour | 12 hours | |
Live Chat | < 1 minute | 1.5 minutes |
Social Media | 1 hour | 5 hours |
Sources: (Clearly Rated, Timetoreply, 2025, Tidio, 2025, Toister Solutions)
How to calculate your average first response time
The math for calculating your average first response time is easy: Add up the total time to the first reply for each conversation, then divide by the total numbers of conversations in that time period.
If you’re using a customer support platform like Help Scout to manage customer conversations, it tracks response time automatically:
Reports like these make it really easy to spot patterns, like if your response time spikes on certain days or during specific seasons.
7 ways to improve your customer service response times
Here are some of my favorite approaches to improving response times — ones I’ve found personally helpful in my experience of building customer support teams at fast-growing startups.
1. Define a Service Level Agreement (SLA) and report on it
You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and if you’re not sharing out reporting around those measurements, you’re far less likely to make them a priority.
A service level agreement is a formal commitment that sets specific, measurable performance targets for how you’ll support customers. Setting an SLA for response times — especially first response — is a clear way to signal that you’re prioritizing responding to customers quickly.
This can be as simple as: “We’ll respond to 90+% of emails within 4 business hours.” It’s about the intention and the commitment (and making sure the target aligns with your customers’ preferences).
2. Prioritize new conversations in your inbox
The most surefire way to improve response times is to make new conversations a top priority. This means organizing your inbox so that it’s easy for your team to identify which conversations are new and need immediate attention.
There are many ways to do this. Start by seeing if your help desk tool has built-in features to help. For instance, Help Scout lets you sort by how long a customer has been “waiting,” making it simple to see who needs a reply first.
Many support tools will also let you set up workflows to automatically escalate conversations that are close to missing an SLA deadline, helping you make sure nothing gets missed.
3. Create quality macros or saved replies
Saved replies (also called macros or canned answers) are pre-defined chunks of text that your support team uses frequently. They’re a critical tool in your goal to reduce response times because they save agents so much time.
Here’s the key, though: Remember that good macros don’t try to be one-size-fits-all behemoths of text. That feels impersonal and often unhelpful.
Instead, create saved replies that are short and focused. Make it easy for your team to combine them in ways that account for different scenarios. For example, instead of a novel-length “password reset” saved reply, you might have one for “password requirements” and one for “security tips.”
Your team is smart. Work with them to create the saved replies, then let them mix-and-match as needed.
4. Build a detailed knowledge base
If your agents spend 15 minutes hunting through poorly organized Notion pages to find an answer each time they get a technical question, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
Instead, invest in building a robust, well-organized knowledge base with great search capabilities. Your knowledge base should include customer-facing articles (which you can link to in responses) and more in-depth, internal documentation that includes extra context or troubleshooting steps.
Knowledge base maintenance is a topic for another day, but know that without a well-organized knowledge base, it’ll always be hard to achieve fast responses.
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5. Use AI for instant replies
Not every team can staff for 24/7 support, which means there are inevitable gaps and delays in your ability to answer customer questions.
You can account for this internally by setting goals to respond within a certain number of business hours — but the fact of the matter is that your customer will still be stuck waiting on the other end, whether you’re open for business or not.
An AI-powered customer service chatbot is one way to help solve this. Most modern chatbots (like Help Scout's AI Answers) leverage your knowledge base to provide instant, accurate responses to your customers. While they can’t solve every issue, they can solve a good percentage of them, providing customers with immediate help and decreasing the backlog that’s waiting for your team the next morning.
6. Take advantage of AI assist tools
AI isn’t just making chatbots better. It’s also making human team members more effective than ever.
AI assist features vary from help desk to help desk, but they often take several common shapes:
Automatically drafting replies based on a customer’s question or issue. Your team member just reviews the draft, edits as needed, and hits send.
Summarizing long emails or email threads so that team members can get up to speed quickly.
Analyzing human-drafted responses to improve clarity, fix the tone, or translate.
AI is perfectly suited for these tasks and is able to accomplish them far faster than a human agent can. By combining AI with great support agents, you get a team that’s better equipped to reply to customers faster (and more accurately) than ever before.
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7. Train your team to be fast and helpful
Training your agents to understand the importance of quick replies is an essential part of building a culture that prioritizes fast customer responses.
But good training isn’t just telling your agents to go faster and calling it a day. Good training means ensuring that your team is aware of the importance of responding quickly, but that they’re also unwilling to compromise on the quality of the support they provide.
Training can take on many different forms:
Product training so agents spend less time researching and more time helping customers.
Teaching them how to use the saved replies and AI assist tools available to be more efficient.
Role-playing common scenarios so agents can practice delivering quick, high-quality responses under realistic conditions.
The goal isn’t to rush agents or put unnecessary pressure on them. It’s to coach and level them up so that they’re consistently getting better at their jobs.
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Find the sweet spot between speed and quality
Customers expect fast replies, and first response time is a critical metric for every support team. But if you ever put speed over substance, it can come back to hurt your customer relationships.
The most successful support teams find the balance between response time and other customer service metrics like resolution time and customer satisfaction.
That balance looks different for every team, but it’s worth the effort to find it. Get it right, and you’ll be well on your way to creating a customer service team that turns interactions into opportunities to strengthen customer relationships and build greater trust.
Thomas Hils
Thomas is a 10+ year veteran of the customer support space at companies like Zapier, Coda, and CoinTracker. He’s the founder of CX consultancy Silience Group and Head of Support at Replo.
