Average handle timeAHT

AHT is measured across all three phases, and leaving out after-call work is the most common way teams understate it. A six-minute call with ninety seconds of wrap-up is a 7.5-minute handle time for staffing purposes, not six.

Industry AHT sits around six minutes for inbound customer service — one dataset of 190,702 staffing calculations puts it at 6 minutes 3 seconds — though it varies widely by call type and complexity. Outbound conversations and AI-handled calls are different quantities and should never be pooled into one AHT figure.

Cutting AHT is not automatically good. Rushed calls push work into repeat contacts, which raises total cost while improving the metric. Track it against first contact resolution, never alone.