Updated December 18, 2025

TL;DR

• What is the average handle time (AHT) equation? AHT = total time to handle a customer interaction, including talk time, hold time, and after-call work.
• It's a call center KPI that impacts customer satisfaction, efficiency, and operational costs.
• The goal of AHT should be optimization, not just reduction. Rushing calls can harm service quality and First Call Resolution (FCR).
• Some of the signs of high AHT are long hold times, repeat calls, low customer satisfaction scores.
• AHT improvement is best seen through agent training, smart call routing, internal knowledge bases, and streamlined processes.

What are the benefits of optimizing AHT? Happier customers, improved productivity, lower costs.

What is average handle time (AHT)?

Average handle time (AHT) is a call center metric that measures the average time required to resolve a customer interaction – from initial contact to final resolution. It includes:

• Talk time – the time spent speaking with or listening to the customer
• Hold time – any time the customer spends waiting on hold
• After-call work (ACW) – post-interaction administrative or follow-up tasks completed by the agent

Why AHT matters?

AHT is one of the most frequently tracked call center KPIs because of its ability to impact customer experience, operational efficiency, and costs. Optimizing AHT allows customers to have their problems resolved as soon as possible and enables agents to assist more customers.

It’s important to note: AHT is not a success metric in isolation. Cutting conversations short may make AHT look better, but will likely hurt FCR, increase repeat contacts, and damage customer satisfaction. AHT as a metric should be looked at to calculate call center service levels, assess efficiency for the call center overall or for specific agents, and establish performance benchmarks.

How to calculate AHT

Average handle time is straightforward to calculate once you’ve gathered some data points.

AHT = (Total talk time + total hold time + total after-call work) ÷ total number of calls

Let’s look at this example:

• Talk time: 2,400 minutes – This is the amount of time your agents spend on a call, including any data input time.
• Total hold time: 600 minutes – This is the amount of time a customer is put on hold during a contact.
• After-call work: 300 – After-call work can vary based on industry, but these are the tasks agents need to complete after a call has concluded.
• Total calls: 300 – This figure could be done during any period of time. Monthly, quarterly, annually, etc.

AHT = (2400 + 600 + 300) ÷ 300 = 11 minutes

Signs your AHT might be too long

Long AHT can impact efficiency and service quality, but it’s not necessarily a problem in itself. There are a number of factors to consider when looking to improve your AHT.

Indicators include:

• High average hold time: Excessive hold times and waiting increases total AHT.
• Low customer satisfaction scores (CSAT): Longer calls often bread frustration; correlating AHT and lower CSAT scores with other indicators, like surveys, can reveal bigger issues.
• Increase repeat contacts: If your customers are having to call more than once in order to handle a single issue, this can increase AHT and hurt customer experience and sentiment.

How to improve (not just reduce) AHT

There’s an important difference between improving average handle time vs. reducing average handle time. Improving AHT means reducing the time it takes to get to a resolution, while maintaining or improving customer satisfaction. The real benchmark for improved AHT is reduced resolution times PLUS high levels of customer satisfaction.

There are several things you can do to improve AHT:

1. Optimize agent onboarding: Focus on delivering comprehensive agent onboarding programs that prioritize understanding of company policies, processes and technologies.
2. Implement ongoing agent coaching: It’s not just onboarding that needs to be optimized, ongoing agent training (both 1:1 and group training) ensures they learn from their experiences and work to improve on AHT, without sacrificing service and customer satisfaction.
3. Use smart all routing: Routing calls to the right representative the first time ensures customers are connected with the most knowledgeable agent for their inquiry, which also reduces AHT.
4. Build a comprehensive knowledge base: In addition to call routing, building a comprehensive knowledge base that provides searchable FAQs, scripts, and troubleshooting guides can help reduce AHT. Effective knowledge management makes it easy for agents to access important information.
5. Enable internal communications and real-time alerts: Instead of transferring calls back and forth, or utilizing slow email communications, enable real-time agent support. This can be to contact a supervisor for support, get AI-powered guidance based on customer keywords, and more, that empower agents in the moment.
6. Leverage technology to analyze interactions: Technology can help organizations identify anomalies in AHT trends, and get at the root cause of why. Analytics tools also understand areas of opportunity and improvement across processes, agent performance, workflows, and more.

Example: Real-world AHT optimization

With the support of CallMiner Eureka, a financial services contact center found agents were spending extra seconds waiting for a billing system to respond to voice prompts. By fixing the software lag, they reduced AHT by 11 seconds overnight, improving both efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Benefits of improved AHT

Improved customer experience: Timely, successful resolutions make for satisfied customers.

Enhanced operational efficiency: By improving AHT, you’ll likely identify other areas for improvement. Improved processes = higher efficiency.

Reduced costs: As you improve efficiency, you will also reduce your costs as it related to agent productivity, customer churn, and more.

AHT challenges

The biggest challenge to tackling AHT is identifying inefficiencies and areas of improvement. Advanced tools like powerful conversation analytics software, AI-driven reporting, and more, can help pinpoint:

• Bottlenecks in call routing
• Agent performance and training gaps
• Customer pain points and frustration
• Inefficient processes and technology issues
• And more

Best practices for optimizing AHT

Stellar AHT is a function of decreased handle time, increased customer satisfaction, and reduced costs.

AHT best practices boil down to:

• Reducing inefficiencies through automation and streamline processes
• Enhancing agent skills by improving training and coaching
• Balancing metrics by reducing AHT, without harming FCT and CSAT

Remember – customer satisfaction is your top priority. As you work toward boosting satisfaction while reducing average handle time, cost reductions will follow.