First response time benchmarks in 2026: under 40 seconds for live chat, under 4 hours for email, and under 60 minutes for social media. The industry average email FRT is 12 hours - far above customer expectations.
First response time (FRT) benchmarks vary significantly by channel: under 40 seconds for live chat, under 1 hour for social media, and under 4 hours for email is where top-performing support teams operate in 2026. Industry averages fall well short of these targets - the average email first response time across industries is 7-10 hours, despite 46% of customers expecting a reply within 4 hours. Understanding channel-specific benchmarks is the starting point for setting realistic FRT targets and identifying where your team's performance stands relative to industry standards. Lorikeet's AI-native resolution approach eliminates FRT entirely for eligible ticket types.
Live chat benchmark: under 2 minutes average, with 40 seconds considered strong performance by Zendesk research.
Email benchmark: top performers achieve under 4 hours; industry average is 7-10 hours across all industries.
Social media benchmark: under 60 minutes recommended; customers on social expect faster responses than email.
82% of customers expect a response within 10 minutes, per customer expectations surveys - significantly faster than most team averages.
FRT benchmarks matter because customer expectations vary by channel, business type, and issue urgency. A 4-hour email FRT is acceptable for most SaaS support contexts but would be catastrophic for an e-commerce chat during a purchase flow. Getting benchmarks right means knowing which channel you're measuring and which customer expectation you're targeting, not applying a single standard across all channels.
This guide covers FRT benchmarks by channel, industry-specific context, and how to interpret your numbers relative to what customers actually expect.
What Is First Response Time and How Is It Measured?
First response time is the elapsed time between when a customer submits a support request and when they receive the first substantive reply from a support agent or AI. For ticket-based channels (email, help desk), it's measured from ticket creation to first non-automated response. For live chat, it's measured from when the customer sends their first message to when an agent or AI replies. FRT does not include automated acknowledgment messages - it measures the first response that addresses the customer's actual issue.
Most modern support platforms (Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk) track FRT automatically at the ticket level. Reporting at the median rather than the mean is more useful, since a small number of extremely delayed tickets can inflate average FRT significantly, masking the typical customer experience. Track both: median FRT (typical experience) and 90th percentile FRT (worst-case experience for 10% of customers).
What Are the FRT Benchmarks by Channel?
Benchmarks differ substantially across channels because customer expectations - and technical norms - differ across channels. Measuring against the right benchmark for each channel is essential for accurate performance assessment.
Live chat
Live chat has the most demanding FRT expectations of any channel. Zendesk identifies 40 seconds as a strong first response benchmark for live chat, with the industry average sitting around 2 minutes. Customers who initiate a chat session expect near-immediate acknowledgment - wait times above 3-5 minutes in live chat correlate with significantly higher abandonment rates. AI-powered chat agents that respond instantly to eligible queries have an effective FRT of under 5 seconds, which is why they're increasingly used as the first layer in live chat workflows.
Email support
Email has the widest gap between benchmark and actual performance of any channel. SuperOffice research found the industry average email first response time is 12 hours, with only 36% of companies responding within 4 hours. The customer expectation, meanwhile, is 4 hours for 46% of customers and under 24 hours for the vast majority. Top-performing support teams target under 4 hours as a floor; premium tiers often commit to under 2 hours or under 1 hour for enterprise customers.
Social media
Social media FRT expectations fall between live chat and email. The recommended benchmark for social responses is under 60 minutes, with many brands publishing a 1-hour commitment publicly. Response times above 4 hours on social media correlate with public escalation - customers who don't receive timely social responses are more likely to post publicly about the failure, which multiplies the reputational impact beyond the original interaction.
Phone support
Phone FRT (time-to-answer or hold time) benchmark is 20-80 seconds, with most centres targeting under 30 seconds for standard priority queues. Unlike other channels, phone FRT has immediate abandonment pressure - customers who wait more than 2-3 minutes on hold abandon at high rates. Call abandonment rate is the key secondary metric to track alongside phone FRT.
What Are FRT Benchmarks by Industry?
Industry context matters because support complexity, customer expectations, and ticket types differ significantly across sectors.
E-commerce and retail. FRT expectations are high because many contacts are time-sensitive (order cancellations, payment failures, delivery issues). Email FRT target: under 2 hours for standard; under 30 minutes for priority or premium tiers. Chat FRT: under 1 minute, since purchase-flow contacts often require near-instant response to prevent cart abandonment.
SaaS and software support. FRT expectations vary by customer tier. Enterprise customers typically expect under 1 hour; standard plan customers expect under 4 hours. Chat and in-app support FRT is typically held to a higher standard than email. B2B SaaS with service-level agreements typically have contractually defined FRT targets by severity level.
Financial services. Strict regulatory and compliance context means FRT for urgent matters (fraud alerts, failed transactions) needs to be near-real-time. General enquiries typically operate on 4-hour email standards. Phone FRT for urgent matters is typically under 2 minutes with direct escalation paths.
Healthcare and insurance. High-sensitivity ticket types (claims, coverage questions, urgent medical matters) often have regulatory FRT requirements in addition to customer expectations. Standard enquiry FRT benchmarks are similar to financial services - under 4 hours for email, under 2 minutes for phone.
How Do Top-Performing Teams Hit FRT Benchmarks?
Teams that consistently beat FRT benchmarks typically use a combination of AI resolution, intelligent routing, and queue prioritisation - not just agent training and macros.
AI agents that resolve the top 20-30% of ticket types by volume (account access, order status, billing queries) remove those tickets from the FRT queue entirely. Their effective FRT is seconds - no queue wait, no agent involvement. This reduces total queue depth, which improves FRT for all remaining human-handled tickets. Teams that combine AI resolution with priority queue segmentation - routing high-value customers and urgent issues to the front of the human queue - see email FRT improve from 7-10 hours to under 2 hours for priority segments within a quarter. Detailed FRT reduction strategies cover the routing and triage changes that produce the largest improvements.
The teams that struggle with FRT are typically treating it as an agent efficiency problem when it's a queue design problem. Queue depth and routing quality explain 80% of FRT variation; individual agent response speed explains the rest.
Lorikeet's Take on FRT Benchmarks
At Lorikeet, FRT benchmarks are a starting point, not the end goal. A team that achieves 4-hour email FRT by sending low-quality first responses that generate 3 follow-up contacts hasn't improved customer experience - it's just moved the bottleneck. Lorikeet's view is that FRT and first-contact resolution rate need to be tracked together: a fast first response that resolves the issue is the only combination that genuinely improves customer satisfaction. Teams chasing FRT in isolation without tracking FCR often see CSAT stay flat or decline even as their speed improves. See how Lorikeet balances FRT and resolution quality in AI-assisted support workflows.
Key Takeaways
Live chat FRT benchmark: under 2 minutes average, 40 seconds for strong performance - AI chat agents achieve sub-5-second FRT for eligible queries.
Email FRT benchmark: top performers under 4 hours; industry average is 7-12 hours, well above the 4-hour threshold 46% of customers expect.
Social media FRT benchmark: under 60 minutes - responses above 4 hours on social correlate with higher rates of public escalation.
FRT is primarily a queue and routing problem, not an agent speed problem - AI resolution and intelligent triage produce 5-10x larger FRT improvements than agent-side optimisation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is considered a good first response time for email support?
Under 4 hours is the widely-accepted target for standard email support, matching the expectations of 46% of customers. Premium and enterprise support tiers typically target under 1-2 hours. The industry average of 7-12 hours means most teams have significant room to improve - and the gap between expectation (4 hours) and average (7-12 hours) represents direct CSAT risk for every hour above the 4-hour threshold.
How do you measure first response time accurately?
Measure FRT from ticket creation timestamp to first non-automated agent response timestamp. Exclude automated acknowledgments (they don't address the customer's issue), measure at the median rather than the mean (to avoid extreme outliers distorting the picture), and track 90th percentile separately (to understand worst-case customer experience). For live chat specifically, measure from first customer message to first agent reply within the same session.
Does FRT or first-contact resolution rate have a bigger CSAT impact?
Both matter, but they have different CSAT relationships. Very slow FRT (12+ hours) creates a CSAT floor problem - no matter how good the eventual resolution, the wait has already damaged the experience. Once FRT is within acceptable range (under 4 hours for email), first-contact resolution becomes the dominant CSAT driver. The highest-CSAT teams optimise for both: fast initial response AND complete resolution on that first response.
Do FRT benchmarks apply to AI-handled tickets?
AI-handled tickets effectively have zero queue wait time - the AI responds instantly. Applying the same FRT benchmark to AI interactions as to human-handled ones is technically unnecessary, but tracking AI response time is still useful for identifying latency issues in AI processing pipelines. For overall FRT reporting, including AI-handled tickets typically improves the blended average significantly, which can mask human-handled FRT performance in aggregate metrics.
FRT benchmarks give your team a clear performance target and a customer-expectation baseline to measure against. The channel-specific benchmarks - 40 seconds for chat, 4 hours for email, 60 minutes for social - are widely understood by customers even if not stated explicitly. Missing them consistently shows up in CSAT scores and, eventually, in churn data.
The path to hitting benchmarks is almost always structural: AI resolution that removes high-volume routine tickets from the human queue, routing logic that eliminates re-queuing, and priority segmentation that ensures urgent and high-value contacts get responses first.
If your FRT is above benchmark, the fix is usually in queue design, not agent training. See how Lorikeet approaches queue design and AI triage to hit FRT targets consistently.
