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How is the Average Response Time Calculated?

  • 17 April 2021
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Hi all! Would anyone mind providing more insight into how the average response time is calculated? We’ve seen the time change quite a bit when calculating from  Mon-Sun versus Sun-Sun, even though our weekends tend to be a bit slower. Thanks!

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Best answer by Julian 3 May 2021, 19:04

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Hi @Julian would be good to get some info on this. We want to make it a KPI but need a better understanding of how’s calculated. 

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Hi, sorry for being a bit late to the party, thanks for mentioning me.

I checked on this last week, I can assume you have checked the tooltip? It shows the definition of this metric:

The average amount of time between the creation of a topic and its first reply. Replies from topic starter don’t count.

Of course it is expected that this metric changes depending on the timeframe which you select. From your description it is not really clear if you see this time increase or decrease when you compare Sun-Sun, could you elaborate on this?

I’ve checked this for some of the weeks on your community, and I could see the time go down only a little bit when comparing Mon-Sun (mostly down with less than 1h). It could be that you saw an outlier (unusual activity by either your team or end users). Did you apply any filtering to this?

Just a theory, but it could be that someone from the community team was creating/preparing content in a hidden area or as an announcement, leading to spikes.

I personally would recommend to filter for registered users, as you are probably mostly interested in measuring topics started by this user group.

Thank you, @Julian ! I compared the results below (Mon - Sun)

to Sun - Sun like this: 

 

 

and you are right - there is about an hour difference. I would have originally assumed because of the differing weekend days, but in both cases, each set of dates has two weekend days in it. 

 

For another comparison: 

 

@Julian do you happen to have any idea why there are differences in the number between dates?

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Hi Liz,

I actually would have loved to dive into the actual data (doing manual exports and calculating the average response time from there), however I did not really get around to do that simply due to lack of time.

As you said, activity is lower on the weekends. This does of course also lower the probability that there is a quick response in topics started on a sunday. As some of these might take until monday or tuesday to actually receive a reply, I can totally see how a small amount of topics could have such an impact on the overall average response time.

It could be that topics that have received no response at all are not taken with in this calculation, thus having your selection end on a sunday could affect this further. I will try to generate a post export of your community today or tomorrow to check the data directly from our database, but as I am not an Excel wizard myself I cannot promise I will get it right easily. :)

Thank you, @Julian !!

@Julian are ideas part of this calculation? Or is it just questions and conversations?

Just a theory, but it could be that someone from the community team was creating/preparing content in a hidden area or as an announcement, leading to spikes.

 

Would also like to know the same as @erin.brisson re: the content that impacts Average Response time. It kind of sounded like @Julian what you mention above re: “preparing content in a hidden area or as an announcement”, Average Response time also includes Articles? 

I’ll check to see if this is already a Feature Request, but it would be cool to see the Success Dashboard with a content filter that parses out Questions, Conversations and Articles to give us a better grasp on the Average Response time across content. I know this could potentially be done via User Role (just exclude any CM or employee content), but just putting that out there :) 

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