Support resolves issues and protects satisfaction, feeding retention analysis. Fair warning: the tidy FRT and deflection medians people quote are mostly buyer expectations, not measured industry numbers, so I set targets against my own baseline.
Hard FRT, AHT, and deflection medians are sparse in 2026 CX reports. Treat the figures here as buyer expectations and SLA targets, not measured industry medians, and calibrate to your own history.
Shape of it
6 metrics
Time from ticket creation to first human response.
BenchmarkExpectation, not a measured median: 65% of buyers expect a response under 1 hour. Set by channel SLA (minutes for chat, hours for email)
The most visible responsiveness signal to customers.
Time from ticket open to resolved.
Measures true problem-solving throughput, not just first-touch speed.
Customer satisfaction score, usually post-ticket survey.
satisfied responses / total responsesBenchmark>90% is strong
Direct read on support quality per interaction.
Share of tickets resolved in one interaction.
resolved first-touch / total ticketsBenchmark~70–75% is a common rule of thumb, not a measured 2026 median; benchmark against your own trend
High FCR lowers cost and lifts satisfaction simultaneously.
Open tickets and inflow rate.
Capacity signal; a rising backlog predicts SLA breaches.
How much effort a customer expended to get resolution.
Effort predicts loyalty better than raw satisfaction in support contexts.