Short answer
FRT stands for first response time, also called time to first response: how long a customer waits between sending a request and getting the first reply. It measures how fast a team responds, not how fast it solves the problem.- Full form
- First response time
- Also called
- Time to first response, first reply time
- Formula
- Time of first reply minus time the request arrived
- Pairs with
- Resolution time and reopen rate
- Other meaning
- Fault ride through, in electrical engineering
FRT is one of the first metrics a support team, contact center or BPO tracks, because customers notice the wait before anything else. A short FRT tells a customer someone is on it. It says nothing yet about whether the answer was right.
How to calculate first response time
For each conversation, subtract the time the request arrived from the time of the first reply. Then summarize across conversations.
A shopper emails at 9:00 and gets a reply at 11:30, so that conversation's FRT is 2.5 hours. Three emails answered in 10 minutes, 20 minutes and 9 hours have an average FRT of about 3 hours 10 minutes, but a median of 20 minutes. The median usually describes the customer's experience better, because one overnight ticket pulls the average far off.
Three choices change the number, so decide them once:
- Business hours or calendar hours.
- Whether automatic acknowledgements count. They should not.
- One target for every channel, or one per channel.
The practice this page rejects is chasing FRT with replies that only acknowledge. A "we got your message" email makes the number look good and helps nobody. Count the first reply that moves the request forward.
With Aide, on topics the team still answers itself, Copilot can write one shared draft for each customer message in the background, so a reply that moves the request forward is waiting before a teammate opens the conversation.
FRT in chat, email and BPO
What counts as fast depends on where the customer is waiting.
- Live chat. The customer is on the page, so FRT is measured in seconds or a few minutes.
- Email. Measured in hours. Many teams aim for a reply the same business day.
- Messaging and social. Somewhere in between; customers expect a reply while the conversation still feels live.
- BPO and contact centers. FRT is often written into the service level agreement with the client, alongside resolution time and quality scores.
FRT vs ART and related metrics
FRT is one of a family of support metrics that are easy to mix up.
| Metric | Full form | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| FRT | First response time | Wait until the first reply |
| ART | Average resolution time | Time until the issue is solved |
| ASA | Average speed of answer | Wait until a call or chat is picked up |
| FCR | First contact resolution | Share of issues solved in the first contact |
A team can post a fast FRT and a slow ART: a quick reply asking for the order number, then a day of back and forth. That is why the two are read together.
In Aide, the first reply does not have to ask for the order number: Aide reads it from what the customer wrote, or recognises a shopper logged in to their Shopify store account, and asks only for what is still missing, one question at a time.
Other meanings of FRT
In electrical engineering, FRT stands for fault ride through: the ability of a wind turbine, solar inverter or other generator to stay connected to the grid through a short voltage dip instead of tripping off. Searches for the FRT full form, including in Hindi, mix both senses. In a call center, BPO or support team, FRT means first response time.
Where Aide fits
In Aide Helpdesk, SLA policies set first response, next response and resolution targets, with a warning before a conversation misses one and an alert when it does. On the topics a team has handed to Aide, it answers chat and email immediately by default, so the first reply can be the answer itself. Aide's analytics then show which conversations it resolved on its own and which a person finished.