In HubSpot, you can already track a plethora of First Response Times for things like Email, Tickets, Live Chat, etc. and you can also track things like how long a ticket remains open via Average Resolution Time: from the time the ticket is created to the time it is closed.
What you cannot track, from what I’ve seen, is the Average Response Time (aside from the First Response) for Tickets/Emails/etc. that require more than one response to resolve.
For example:
A customer submits a support ticket - they receive an answer 24 hours later.
^This would be a First Response Time of 24 hours. If the ticket is resolved from this answer, that also becomes the Average Resolution Time (because it was resolved right away) + Average Response Time (because you only needed the one response).
But if the ticket was not resolved in that first response - either because the agent needed more information or it’s a troubleshooting scenario (so no 1 immediate correct answer), you have to wait for the customer to respond and, once they do, you now have:
- From the time the customer responds to your inquiry, to
- The time you respond to their response.
- You can rinse/repeat this scenario until a solution is found, which adds more and more response time intervals to average out in the end.
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The reason why you cannot rely on Average Resolution Time here for an accurate KPI/Report is that it doesn’t take into consideration how long it takes the customer to respond.
For example: Customers A and B have the exact same problem, but we require more information in order to resolve their issue. Our first response to both is 6 hours.
- Customer A takes 12 hours to respond with the additional information; we resolve it 12 hours later and close the ticket. Total Time to Resolution = 30 hours
- Customer B takes 84 hours to respond with the additional information; we resolve it 12 hours later and close the ticket. Total Time to Resolution = 102 hours
Drastically different numbers - which would be resolved if we could track the time between their response to us and our response back to them (and rinse/repeat this for as many responses as needed - and divide it by the number of responses to get an average response time).
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Within HubSpot - timestamps are given when a customer responds to an email/ticket/etc. HubSpot also offers automation for ticket pipelines to move the ticket back and forth between “Waiting on Us” and “Waiting on Them” so we can visually see when a customer has gotten back to you with more information (and timestamps this automation action as well!).
Why can’t HubSpot create a value for this in their reporting system? The timestamps natively exist - and this would help us track the Response Time for Every Interaction and Response in an email/ticket thread - giving you a more accurate representation of how quickly your agents are responding to customers that require more than one response to reach a resolution.
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Additionally, I have seen some of the community suggestions and solutions - one that includes having the system use workflows to automatically create a date stamp when a ticket moves through a pipeline. The problem with this is:
- It only tracks by days - so even if you resolve a ticket in 30 minutes (it’s a really active customer), it counts as 1 full day;
- This only works for 1 additional response - you can use First Response Time for the first reply, and this date stamp for their response back. But if you need to continue conversing, the workflow workaround does not create new date stamps, nor does it override the original one. The workaround for this would be to create additional pipes in the pipeline, but that just makes your ticket pipeline look awful (and requires your own automation beyond the HubSpot default for tickets)
Hopefully this is a consideration moving forward - I would love a more concrete representation of Interactions and Response Times to track our CS KPIs
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