Average Handle Time (AHT)
AHT is the average minutes a support agent spends handling a ticket from open to close, the operational cost-per-contact metric.
Average Handle Time (AHT) is the average minutes a support agent spends handling a ticket from open to close. It includes active conversation time plus any after-call or after-ticket work (notes, follow-ups, escalations).
In context
AHT is the operational metric that drives cost-per-contact directly. A 30% AHT reduction at a $4/minute fully-loaded labor cost saves $1.20 per minute of average ticket time. Across hundreds of thousands of tickets annually, the math compounds into a material P&L line.
AHT moves through four mechanisms: the agent types less (AI draft pre-filled), the agent looks up less (right policy surfaced), the agent decides faster (suggested next action is correct), or the agent doesn't escalate (AI resolves inline). Each requires the AI suggestion to be right more often than wrong, below ~80% suggestion-acceptance rate, the assistance costs AHT instead of saving it.
Auralis cohort: ~30% blended AHT reduction across channels. Native helpdesk AI deployments commonly publish 10-15% AHT reduction in steady state, the gap traces to who runs the weekly tuning loop.
How Auralis uses Average Handle Time (AHT)
Auralis Assist contracts on ~30% blended AHT reduction. The suggestion-ranking is tuned weekly by Auralis; below confidence threshold, suggestions are suppressed. Net AHT lift is the contracted metric.