How long a ticket stays open from creation to resolved or closed. A lagging metric, best paired with first-response time.
Resolution time measures the full lifespan of a request: the clock starts when the ticket is created and stops when it’s marked resolved or closed. It’s a lagging metric — you only know it after the work is done — which makes it useful for spotting trends but poor for steering a conversation in progress. Teams usually track it as an average or median over a period rather than obsessing over any single ticket, since one outlier rarely says much on its own.
How to measure it
- Pick a clock — measure against calendar time or only business hours; an overnight gap shouldn’t count against a daytime team.
- Use the median, not just the mean — a few slow edge cases drag the average and hide the typical experience.
- Decide what “resolved” means — closing on first reply versus after confirmation produces very different numbers.
Why it matters
On its own, resolution time can mislead — a thorough fix may take longer and still delight, while a fast close can mean the issue was punted, not solved. Pair it with FRT to see both speed of acknowledgement and speed of closure, and watch it next to satisfaction so you don’t optimize for closing tickets at the customer’s expense.
A concrete example
An e-commerce store sees its average resolution time jump during a sale. The median is steady, so most tickets close quickly; the average is skewed by a handful of refund disputes waiting on a supplier. The fix isn’t to rush every ticket — it’s to track those long-tail cases separately, often against an SLA target, and to exclude time spent waiting on the customer or a third party so the metric reflects the team’s own responsiveness rather than someone else’s delay.
How Cherryrise handles it
Cherryrise reports resolution time alongside first-response time and SLA targets in reporting, with business-hours-aware clocks so the numbers reflect when your team actually works. See how to set SLAs for turning these metrics into targets.