How fast does your team really reply — and is that fast enough? Enter your typical first reply time and your inbox volume, and get an honest grade against where customer expectations sit today, plus a read on whether your per-person load is sustainable.
Under four hours means a customer who writes in the morning hears back before lunch. Solidly ahead of average, and usually the best sustainable target for a small team.
Next milestone: a first reply under 1 hour moves you to A (where expectations have moved).
Workload: ~20 emails per person per day — comfortable
Under 30 emails per person per day leaves room to write real answers instead of racing the queue.
Grades assume replies during business hours and measure first response time — the wait until a human's first real reply, not an auto-acknowledgment. The bands are opinionated: they reflect where published customer-expectation surveys and our own experience running shared inboxes agree, rather than any single study's average.
For support and sales inboxes during business hours, under four hours is good and under one hour is excellent. The classic 24-hour standard still counts as acceptable, but customer expectations have shifted well below it — teams competing on service treat one business hour as the target.
First response time measures how long until a human sends the first real reply; resolution time measures how long until the problem is solved. Customers judge the two separately — a fast first reply buys patience for a slow fix, but a slow first reply is never forgiven by a fast fix, because the silence is what felt broken.
Yes, for setting targets and grading your team — a message that arrives Friday evening and gets answered Monday morning was answered promptly. Measure both if you can: calendar-hours numbers show what customers experience, business-hours numbers show how your team actually performs.
You need tooling that records when each conversation arrived and when the first human reply went out — averages hide problems, so look at the 90th percentile, not just the mean. Repliqo tracks first response time per inbox and per responder automatically, including p90, on the workspace overview.
Repliqo measures first response time automatically — per inbox and per responder, including p90 — so the number you just guessed becomes one you actually know.