ASA: Average Speed of Answer
The average wait before a queued contact reaches an agent.
What it means
Average speed of answer is the mean wait a customer experiences in queue before an agent picks up, counted across answered contacts in a period. It is an average, which is exactly its weakness: it describes the middle of the distribution and says nothing about the tail where the abandonments live.
How it is calculated
ASA = total queue wait time of answered contacts / answered contacts
Why it matters
ASA is easy to explain to a client, which is why it ends up in contracts, but service level is the better commitment because it is stated as a percentage answered within a threshold. Two queues with an identical ASA can deliver very different customer experiences if one is consistent and the other alternates between instant answers and five-minute waits.
Common mistakes
- Reading ASA without abandonment rate. Abandoned contacts are excluded from the average, so a queue can improve its ASA simply by having more people give up.
- Committing to an ASA in a client contract when service level is the metric the operation actually manages to.
- Averaging across the day. The peak half-hour is where the contract is won or lost.
See also
- Service LevelThe percentage of contacts answered within a target time, written as 80/20 (80% within 20 seconds).
- Abandonment rateThe share of queued contacts that hang up before reaching an agent.
- SLA: Service Level AgreementA contractual performance target, e.g. answering X% of calls within Y seconds.
- Erlang CThe staffing formula that estimates how many agents a queue needs to hit a service level at a given volume.