Running the centre
First response time
First response time is how long it takes from someone reporting an incident until a member of staff replies or picks it up. It does not measure whether it was fixed, but how long the person who reported it waited to know someone had it. It is given as a median or average over a period.
Also known asFRT · time to first response · response time · time to acceptance
How it is calculated
For each report, the time it came in is subtracted from the time of the first response, and across all reports in a period the average is given or, better, the median, which is not dragged up by the few that took days. Call centres have a similar measure, the average speed to answer (ASA), which is one of those agreed in an SLA. It is worth splitting the result by priority and by time slot: a report at dawn and one at midday are not comparable.
First you have to decide what counts as a first response. An automatic "received" acknowledgement should not count, because nobody has read it. What matters to the person who reported it is that a human has seen it and has it, so it makes more sense to take the moment someone accepts the ticket. That is half the story; the other half is resolution time. In Bedel, the figures are on dashboard and metrics.
Worth knowing
What people take for granted: that a quick reply means good service. A team can reply in minutes and take a week to fix the problem. First response measures attention, not finished work; that is why it is read alongside resolution time and reopened tickets.
Sources
Related terms
- SLAAn SLA (service level agreement) is a written commitment to the time and quality with which a service is delivered. In a student residence it usually sets how many hours a maintenance ticket has to be picked up or resolved by type, and it is what decides what counts as overdue.
- Resolution timeResolution time is how long it takes from a fault being reported until it is fixed and the ticket is closed. It is the figure felt by whoever is living with the broken shower, and the one compared with the agreed deadline to decide which tickets are overdue.