The clock starts ticking when a customer reached out to your business for help on an issue. This timer doesn’t stop counting the seconds until your customer gets the help they need and resolves their issue.
In the olden days, marketers and operation managers didn’t have a term to describe this duration of time. Thankfully, it’s now known as the mean time to resolution (MTTR).
If you’re running a business, or you’re interested in learning more about the power of customer service and running a tight ship, then this article is for you.
Keep on reading for our full breakdown of the key seven facts you need to know about MTTR. We’ll cover how to reduce mean time to resolution, calculate MTTR, and other essential factors.
1. What Is Mean Time to Resolution?
In simplest terms, it measures how long it takes on average from when customer contact is initiated. And when it is recorded as “resolved” in a customer care database.
Time to Resolution is sometimes referred to as Mean Time to Resolution or Time to Resolve, and it may be shortened as MTTR or TTR in certain instances.
When it comes to application performance, you’ll want to explore the different AMP solutions available on the market.
2. Why Does MTTR Matter?
Your customer’s time is precious to them, and your time is valuable to them as well. Therefore, Time To Resolution is important. The actual response to a customer’s question is just one aspect of providing excellent service.
It is nearly always the case that a client who raises a question and receives a satisfactory response within a few hours will be more pleased with the encounter than a customer who receives the same answer many days later.
According to research, being more prompt and effective in addressing problems is associated with higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
3. How to Calculate MTTR for Incidents
To put it simply, time to resolution (TTR) is a straightforward computation that records the “start” and “finish” times. Specifically, of each customer care interaction. Then, it averages that figure out over all of the talks within a particular timeframe.
Customer service software, on the other hand, will have subtle differences. Those will influence the average and make comparison different systems more difficult.
For example, should you label a discussion as “resolved” if it has been ended without receiving a response from the client? Or what if it is still in the “pending” state even though the client hasn’t responded in days or even weeks? You’ll want to consider your priorities and assess your labels to fit your goals.
4. You Need an Incident-Management Action Plan
At the most fundamental level, teams need a clearly defined escalation strategy. One that outlines what to do in the event of a problem. Starting with who to contact, how to record what is occurring, and how to put things in motion to resolve the issue.
The majority of companies select one of three main incident-management approaches. Ad hoc, rigid, and fluid are all words that come to mind.
Modern software firms generally choose the fluid method. Unless there is a particular need to utilize either the rigid or ad hoc models in a certain situation.
A fluid incident response model enables organizations to mobilize the appropriate resources. And to call on team members with the appropriate skills to address specialized issues.
Those are situations in which it is often difficult to determine exactly what is happening—or what capabilities may be required to resolve the problem—at the time of the incident.
As teams get a better understanding of an issue, using a fluid approach makes it simpler for them to develop innovative solutions to difficult new challenges.
5. Define Roles and Responsibilities
Incident commanders play a critical role at every stage of the incident response process, serving as a centralized point of leadership during events and assisting teams in making critical trade-offs throughout the response process.
The incident commander is in charge of coordinating the engineering and communication responses during a disaster (the latter involves engaging with customers to gather information to pass along updates about the incident and our response). The incident commander ensures that the appropriate individuals are made aware of the situation.
6. Prioritize Education and Training for Your MTTR Team
It makes sense to invest in cross-training for engineers to optimize the advantages of a fluid model by allowing them to perform different response roles and tasks in the field. The necessity for experts in particular systems and technologies will always be there, but depending on a small number of specialists to the exclusion of others is a surefire way to create burnout and employee turnover.
Other members of the team should be able to develop sufficient knowledge to deal with the majority of problems, enabling your experts to concentrate on the most challenging and urgent situations. When it comes to collecting and transmitting specific technical knowledge within your engineering team, comprehensive “runbooks” may be an excellent resource.
7. Monitor Everything All the Time
When it comes to fixing things, it’s a truth that you can’t repair something if you don’t know it’s broken.
A good understanding of your apps and infrastructure is critical to the success or failure of any incident-response procedure. And, while it might seem a bit of an overkill to monitor 24/7, you’d be surprised at how simple it can be with a bit of habit formation and practice.
MTTR and Customer Satisfaction: Unlocked
It can be overwhelming to try to create an MTTR-based incident response from the start. But, we hope that our article has shed some light on how to navigate reducing your mean time to resolution.
These seven data points aren’t everything you need. But, they provide a great starting point for your research and implementation strategies.
And, if you liked our explainer, you’ll definitely want to check out all of our additional tips and strategies. You’ll find them available in our business section.
