How to set a first-reply target your team can keep

When I ran support at an outdoor gear shop, our first-reply target was one hour. We picked it in a meeting because it sounded good. We hit it on 54% of messages, and after a few months nobody looked at the number.

Start from what you already do

Export last month's messages and sort them by time to first reply. Find the time that 80% of them beat. For most of the 438 teams on Mailslot that number sits between 2 and 5 business hours for email. Set your target there. A target the team hits four times out of five is one people will defend.

Set it per channel

Someone in chat is waiting on the page. Someone who filled in a form has gone back to work. Our defaults are 5 minutes for chat, 4 business hours for email and 8 for forms, and about two thirds of teams change at least one of them in the first month.

Count business hours only

If your team works 9 to 5, a message at 4:50 pm with a 4-hour target is due at 12:50 the next day. Counting clock hours tells your team they failed at 8:50 pm while they were eating dinner.

Tighten it once a quarter

When you hit the target on 90% of messages for a month, shorten it by a quarter. Kestrel Supply went from 4 hours to 2 hours to 45 minutes over a year this way, and never had a month where the team felt behind.