Average Wait Time

In depth

Average wait time (AWT) measures how long customers wait before they are helped. In a customer support setting, that means the time spent in the queue, from the moment someone joins the line to the moment they are connected with help. As the formula shows, it is the total wait time across contacts divided by the number of contacts over a period.

It is worth anchoring the term firmly to support, because "average wait time" is used in plenty of other places, from A&E departments to airport security lines. Here it refers specifically to the wait in a customer support queue, whether that queue is for a phone line, a live chat, or a callback. Everything below is about that support context.

The metric is closely related to average speed of answer, but the two are not the same. Average speed of answer counts only the contacts that were answered, isolating the queue time until an agent picked up. Average wait time takes the broader view of waiting across contacts, which can include those who abandoned the queue before anyone reached them. That difference matters: a queue with heavy abandonment can post a respectable speed of answer while its wait time reveals how many people were left hanging. The two are best read side by side.

What counts in average wait time?

Average wait time is about queue time, not conversation time. The clock starts when the customer is genuinely waiting for help, having cleared any menu or routing step, and stops when they are connected. The length of the conversation that follows belongs to other metrics, such as handle time, not to wait time.

The main authoring choice is how you treat abandoned contacts. Include the time they spent waiting and the figure reflects the full experience of the queue, including its failures; exclude them and it narrows towards average speed of answer. Neither is wrong, but the choice should be deliberate and applied consistently, and it helps to report abandonment alongside the wait so a low figure cannot hide people quietly giving up. Measuring per channel keeps the comparison fair, since expectations on live chat and on a phone line differ so much.

What's a good average wait time?

There is no universal benchmark. What counts as acceptable depends heavily on the channel: customers expect live chat to be answered almost immediately, while a wait of a few minutes on the phone may be perfectly tolerable. A wait time that would be alarming on chat can be reasonable on a voice queue.

So the most useful target is one your team can hold in its busy periods, not just its quiet ones, and the trend over time tells you more than any single reading. The dependable way to bring it down is to shorten the queue itself: when routine questions are resolved instantly by self-service, fewer customers ever join the line, and the ones who do are seen sooner. Pair the metric with a satisfaction score so a falling wait time reflects customers who were genuinely helped, not rushed.