Customer service response time is how long a customer waits between sending a message and getting the first reply from a person on your team. Most support teams measure it in business hours, and the version that matters most is first response time (FRT).
So what is normal? Across Keeping accounts, from June 22 to September 20, 2026, 33% of first responses took under one working hour and about three quarters took under 24 working hours, using each account’s configured working schedule. On an eight-hour schedule, 24 working hours is about three business days.
Below you’ll find the full distribution, how it compares with older studies, targets by channel, the first response time formula with worked examples, and how to measure all of it when your support runs through Gmail.
What is customer service response time?
Customer service response time is the time it takes for any one of your support staff to reply to a customer’s email, chat or message. If a customer emails at 10:00 a.m. and a teammate answers at 11:30 a.m., the response time is 90 minutes. Teams usually count business hours only, and automated replies don’t count.
Response time is really a family of metrics. They measure different waits, so it helps to keep them apart:
| Metric | What it measures | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| First response time (FRT) | From the customer’s first message to the first human reply | How quickly a customer knows someone has it |
| Next response time | From each later customer message to the team’s next reply | Whether the conversation keeps moving after hello |
| Resolution time | From the first message until the issue is solved | How long the customer’s problem actually lasts |
A fast first reply that says “we’re looking into it” improves FRT without improving resolution time. That’s fine, as long as you track both.
Zendesk’s guide to first reply time (updated January 2026) is explicit that automated acknowledgements don’t count: the clock stops only when a person replies.
Customer service response time benchmarks for 2026
Here is how quickly Keeping teams sent their first reply. Across Keeping accounts, more than 274,000 conversations that arrived from June 22 through September 20, 2026 later received a reply. Using each account’s configured working schedule, 33% of first responses took under one working hour, about three quarters took under 24 working hours, and 15% took more than 48 working hours.
| First response time (working hours) | Share of first responses | On an eight-hour working day |
|---|---|---|
| Under 1 working hour | 33% | Within the first hour the team is working |
| Under 24 working hours | About three quarters | Within about three business days |
| More than 48 working hours | 15% | More than about six business days |
Keeping data, June 22 – September 20, 2026: more than 274,000 conversations that later received a reply, measured against each account’s configured working schedule.
The typical Keeping team answered 30% of its new conversations within an hour. That figure describes the median team rather than the pooled conversations, so a handful of very large accounts can’t move it.
Volume gives those numbers context. In the same period, the median Keeping team received about 18 new customer conversations on a working day, and the busiest quarter of teams received 44 or more. Our roundup of customer service tools uses the same figures to size what a small team needs.
The working-hours figures also appear in our guide to email response time, which looks at email on its own.
Want your own numbers next to these? Keeping’s reports count business hours only, so you can put your team’s first response times beside this distribution.
How we measured
These figures come from aggregated, anonymous Keeping usage data. No single company can be identified from them.
Each conversation’s first response time was measured against the working schedule that account configured in Keeping, so nights and weekends outside that schedule don’t count. The buckets cover responded conversations only. They are not a reply rate against all inbound email, because a conversation nobody answered never enters them.
Because the clock is working hours, the figures don’t compare directly with studies measured in elapsed (clock) hours, including the ones in the next section.
Average customer service response time: what older studies found
The most widely quoted average comes from SuperOffice’s 2018 Customer Service Benchmark Report, which emailed 1,000 companies. SuperOffice found that “the average response time to handle a customer service request is 12 hours and 10 minutes”, measured in elapsed time, and that 62% of companies didn’t reply to customer service emails at all.
Customer expectations are tighter. In a March 2020 survey of more than 3,200 people in the US, UK and Canada, Toister Performance Solutions found that a reply within one hour would meet the expectations of 88% of consumers. Nearly a third expected a reply that fast.
You’ll often see “12 to 24 hours is average” quoted as the rule for email. It usually appears with no source. The sourced figure is SuperOffice’s 12 hours and 10 minutes, from 2018, in clock time.
An average response time also hides the long tail. Ten replies in 20 minutes and one reply three days later produce an average that describes nobody’s experience. That’s why Zendesk recommends the median, and why the Keeping figures above are a distribution: what share of customers heard back within one working hour, within 24 working hours, and after more than 48.
If you’re setting targets for email only, see average email response time for a target table by type of email.
Response time targets by channel
Customers expect different speeds on different channels. Chat feels like a conversation, so a wait of minutes feels long. Email feels like a letter, so hours are acceptable. Use these as starting points, then adjust for your volume and hours.
| Channel | What customers expect | Practical starting target | Source and year |
|---|---|---|---|
| A reply within one hour meets 88% of consumers’ expectations | 4 working hours for standard requests, 1 hour for urgent | Toister Performance Solutions, 2020 | |
| Social | About three quarters expect a response within 24 hours or sooner | Same working day | Sprout Social Index, 2025 |
| Live chat | An answer while they are still on the page | Seconds, not minutes | No current study verified |
Sources checked October 13, 2026. The social figure is from the 2025 Sprout Social Index. Live chat benchmarks circulate widely, but we couldn’t trace a current original study, so the table gives no number. Phone support is usually judged by hold time and answer speed rather than reply time, so it isn’t listed.
Customer service response time standards
A target only works once it’s written down. Turn the numbers above into a short internal standard: a first-reply target for each channel, a faster one for urgent requests, the business hours and holidays the clock follows, and who is alerted when a request is close to the limit.
When that standard becomes a promise to customers or other teams, it is a response time SLA. Separate urgent and standard requests from the start, so a billing outage doesn’t wait behind a feature question.
What is first response time (FRT)?
First response time is the time between a customer’s first message and the first reply from a person on your team. It’s also called first reply time or time to first response. It does not include automated responses, so an autoresponder doesn’t stop the clock. Most teams measure it in business hours.
FRT is the response time metric customers feel most. Until that first reply arrives, they don’t know whether anyone has read their message, so a slow one drives follow-ups (“just checking you got this”) and duplicate requests.
Measure it for the team and for each agent. A team FRT of two hours can hide one teammate who replies in 20 minutes and another who takes a day. Per-agent FRT shows where to rebalance work or offer help, and it helps you spot the person quietly covering everyone else’s inbox.
Track it over a fixed period, such as a week or a month, so one busy Monday doesn’t swing the number.
How to calculate first response time
To calculate first response time, add up the time each conversation waited for its first human reply, then divide by the number of conversations that received one:
First response time = total time to first reply ÷ number of conversations answered
Here’s a worked example. Four conversations get their first replies after 1, 2, 4 and 5 working hours:
- Add the waits: 1 + 2 + 4 + 5 = 12 hours.
- Count the answered conversations: 4.
- Divide: 12 ÷ 4 = 3 hours average first response time.
Count business hours, not clock hours. Keeping’s first response time help article uses this example: with a working schedule of 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., a message that arrives at 6:00 p.m. and gets a reply at 9:00 a.m. the next day has a first response time of 1 hour. Only the hour from 8:00 to 9:00 counts. In clock time the same reply took 15 hours.
Report the median as well as the mean. For the four waits above, the median is also 3 hours (halfway between 2 and 4). Now change the last wait from 5 hours to 29. The average jumps to 9 hours, while the median stays at 3. The median tells you what a typical customer experienced; the average tells you a long tail exists. Report both, plus the share of conversations answered within your target.
How to measure response time in Gmail
Gmail doesn’t report reply times. It shows when each message arrived and when a reply was sent, but it won’t calculate the gap, exclude nights and weekends, or compare teammates. For the manual spreadsheet method and a comparison of tools, see our guide to email response time tracking.
If your team shares an address like support@ in Gmail, Keeping’s response-time reports do the calculation for you. The clock counts business hours only, replies sent outside your schedule are left out, and you can see response time and resolution time for the whole team or for each person. The busiest-times view shows when requests arrive, which helps with scheduling.
Service level agreements (SLAs) and CSV export are on the Advanced plan, $29 per user per month billed monthly or $24 per user per month billed annually, as of October 2026.
See how quickly your team responds
Track first response and resolution times, spot bottlenecks, and see where teammates need support, all while your team keeps working in Gmail.
How to improve customer service response time
Faster replies come from removing the waiting nobody sees: unclaimed messages, blank-page drafting and gaps in cover. The five changes below target those three.
Assign an owner to every conversation
Most slow replies are messages everyone saw and nobody claimed. Give every new conversation an owner, either by assigning it during a daily sweep or with automatic rules. Once a name is attached, the question “has anyone answered this?” goes away, and so does the duplicate reply.
Send an acknowledgement that sets expectations
An automated response email tells the customer their message arrived and when to expect an answer (ticket acknowledgement templates show the wording). It doesn’t count toward first response time, and it shouldn’t pretend to be a person. It does cut “did you get my email?” follow-ups, which frees time for real replies.
Use shared templates
Most teams answer the same ten questions every week. Keep customer service email templates for them, shared so everyone uses the current version. A template gets you to a first draft in seconds. Personalize the opening line and the answer, then send.
Alert before a target is missed
Set an alert before the response deadline, not after it, so whoever owns the conversation has time to reply or hand it off. Review the misses each week. They usually point at one inbox, one shift or one type of request.
Staff to your busiest hours
Requests don’t arrive evenly, and at around 18 new conversations a working day for the median Keeping team, one missing hour of cover shows up fast in your first response time. Check when your requests arrive, by hour and by weekday, and line up cover with those peaks.
Frequently asked questions about customer service response time
What is a typical response time?
In Keeping’s data from June 22 to September 20, 2026, 33% of first responses took under one working hour and about three quarters took under 24 working hours, using each account’s configured working schedule. A typical team answered 30% of new conversations within an hour. Older elapsed-time studies, such as SuperOffice’s 2018 study, found an average of about 12 hours.
How long does it take for customer service to reply?
It depends on the channel and the team. Email replies often take hours: in Keeping’s June 22 to September 20, 2026 data, about three quarters of first responses arrived within 24 working hours. Live chat customers expect an answer while they are still on the page, and about three quarters of consumers expect a social media reply within 24 hours (Sprout Social Index, 2025).
What is FRT in customer service?
FRT stands for first response time: the time between a customer’s first message and the first reply from a person on your team. Automated acknowledgements don’t count. Most teams measure it in business hours only and report it per team and per agent, alongside resolution time.
How to improve customer response time?
Give every conversation an owner so nothing waits unclaimed, send an acknowledgement that sets expectations, and keep shared templates for common questions. Then set a response target, alert people before it is missed, and schedule cover for your busiest hours. Measure first response time weekly so you can see whether the changes work.
What is the importance of response time in customer service?
Response time tells customers whether anyone is looking after their request. A quick first reply heads off follow-up emails and duplicate requests, and it sets the tone for the rest of the conversation. A 2020 Toister Performance Solutions survey found that an email reply within one hour met the expectations of 88% of consumers.
What are customer service response time rules?
Response time rules are the targets a team commits to for each channel and priority, such as a first reply within four working hours for standard email and one hour for urgent requests. Write them into an internal policy or SLA, define business hours and holidays, and decide what happens when a target is about to be missed.
