AHT (Average Handling Time) has long been an important tool for contact centers to measure the handling time for tasks, case types, and individuals, but has the metric outlived its usefulness?
If you use AHT i.e. average handling time as the most important KPI for measuring and evaluating your customer contacts, it rarely provides a complete picture of the customer experience. In addition to the risk that customer satisfaction is negatively affected if the contact feels rushed, it often leads to lower efficiency for the entire customer journey because the customer needs to make repeated contacts.
AHT should instead be used as a tool to detect problems. If the handling time increases or if the average trend starts to deviate, upwards or downwards, you need to understand the reason behind it. Is more training needed? Or is there a specific type of incident that your employees do not know how to handle? The advantage of analyzing the trends is that you can do something about them and improve your employees' conditions and the customer experience.
AHT is therefore still an important KPI, but for the KPI to reach its full potential, it should not be used in isolation, but together with other KPIs in order for you to get a complete picture of the current status of your specific contact center.