Average wait time is the total time customers spend waiting for service across all touchpoints—including IVR navigation, queue holds, and transfers—before their issue begins being addressed.

This metric is broader than ASA, which only captures queue time before agent pickup. Average wait time accounts for the full customer experience: the 45 seconds navigating phone menus, the hold while being transferred to a specialist, the dead air between responses in chat. It's the honest answer to "how long did this actually take?"

For omnichannel operations, average wait time reveals friction that channel-specific metrics miss. Your chat ASA might look great at 30 seconds, but if customers waited 5 minutes for a callback that then took 2 more minutes to connect, the experience was far worse than the numbers suggest. Healthtech and insurance companies with complex routing logic should track this closely—transfers and escalations are where wait time compounds.

Related terms: Average speed of answer, First reply time, Escalation rate