Glossary
Resolution time
The total elapsed time from a ticket being opened to being marked resolved, including wait periods.
Resolution time is the total elapsed time from a ticket being opened to being marked resolved. Unlike average handle time, it includes wait periods: the customer's response time, scheduled callbacks, and overnight gaps. Resolution time is the metric customers actually feel, since it tracks their full experience from question to answer. Track median resolution time rather than mean because outliers (long-tail edge cases) skew the average. Tier-based SLAs typically anchor on resolution time. AI auto-resolution collapses resolution time to seconds for the tickets it handles, which lifts the median across the full ticket mix.
Related terms
- First contact resolution (FCR): The percentage of tickets resolved on the first reply, without follow-up exchanges or escalations.
- Service level agreement (SLA): A defined commitment to respond or resolve within a target time, often by channel and priority.
- Average handle time (AHT): The average time an agent spends actively working on a single ticket, including reply and lookup time.