The Hidden Cost of AHT

How Optimisation Can Undermine Trust, Empathy, and Long-Term Customer Relationships

The village baker knew exactly how long a loaf should take.

Not because he carried a stopwatch. Not because somebody had calculated the optimum production rate. Simply because years of practice had taught him that dough has its own pace.

Too little time and the loaf emerges dense and underdeveloped. Too much time and it collapses under its own weight. The skill was never in making the process as fast as possible. The skill was in understanding how much time was required for the desired outcome.

Modern organisations often struggle with this distinction.

Time is visible. Outcomes are not.

Time can be measured to the second. Trust, understanding, reassurance, confidence and loyalty cannot. Faced with that imbalance, organisations naturally gravitate towards what is easiest to count. We measure the duration of activities and, over time, begin to assume that shorter durations represent better performance.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the contact centre.

Average Handling Time has been one of the dominant operational metrics for decades. The rationale is understandable. Contact centres process thousands, sometimes millions, of customer interactions every year. Small reductions in average call duration can create significant capacity savings. AHT offers leaders a simple way to understand how efficiently customer demand is being managed.

At a contact centre level, this remains perfectly reasonable.

The difficulty begins when a measure designed to describe the performance of a system becomes a target for the individuals working within it.

Psychologists have long understood that people adapt their behaviour in response to the metrics used to evaluate them. Whether through goal-setting theory, reinforcement principles, or the broader effects of performance management systems, the outcome is remarkably consistent. What gets measured captures attention. What captures attention influences behaviour.

The adviser who knows their handling time is being monitored does not simply answer customer queries. They answer customer queries while carrying an awareness of the clock.

Most of the time, this awareness remains subtle. It appears in small decisions rather than dramatic ones. An opportunity to probe further is ignored. A conversation is guided towards closure slightly earlier than it otherwise might have been. A customer receives an answer but not necessarily the confidence that accompanies genuine understanding.

None of these moments appear significant in isolation. Yet customer relationships are not built through isolated moments. They are built through the accumulation of experiences, impressions, and interpretations.

And interpretation is where the psychology becomes interesting.

Why Customers Call Humans

If customers simply wanted information, most contact centres would have disappeared years ago.

Websites, FAQs, chatbots, knowledge bases and AI assistants are increasingly capable of answering straightforward questions. The interactions that continue to reach advisers often involve something more complex. Sometimes the complexity lies in the problem itself. More often, the customer may already suspect what the answer is. What they are seeking is confirmation.

They may have found the relevant policy online; they are seeking reassurance that they have interpreted it correctly. They may understand the process; they are seeking confidence that the process will actually work.

Psychologists have long recognised that uncertainty carries an emotional burden. Human beings are remarkably uncomfortable when outcomes feel ambiguous or unpredictable. In these situations, information alone is often insufficient. People seek social confirmation. They look for cues that reduce doubt and increase confidence in their understanding of a situation.

This is one of the reasons human interaction remains valuable despite continual advances in self-service technology. It’s why voice continues to be the channel of choice for contact centres.

The adviser does not simply provide answers. They help customers make sense of answers.

Yet sensemaking requires curiosity. It requires listening. It requires enough space for a customer to explain not only what has happened, but why it matters to them.

This creates an uncomfortable tension with individual handling time targets. The customer experiences the conversation as a process of understanding, whilst the adviser experiences the conversation as a process that is being measured.

Most of the time, neither party consciously recognises this tension. Nevertheless, it still shapes the interaction.

Completion Is Not the Same as Resolution

Consider two calls.

In the first, the customer receives the correct answer within four minutes. The interaction is efficient, accurate and compliant. The adviser closes the call and moves on to the next customer.

In the second, the same answer is provided. The difference is that the adviser spends an additional two minutes exploring the customer’s concerns, checking their understanding, and ensuring they are confident about what happens next.

Operationally, the calls appear different. Psychologically, they may be worlds apart.

Contact centres naturally measure what happens during the interaction. Customers often evaluate what happens afterwards.

The memory of a service experience is not created solely by the outcome. It is influenced by how understood, respected and supported the customer felt throughout the interaction. Two customers may receive identical solutions while leaving with very different impressions of the organisation behind them.

This distinction becomes particularly important when trust is involved.

Trust develops through small signals that suggest competence, attention and genuine interest, rather than through grand gestures. The adviser who takes time to explore an issue communicates something that extends beyond the immediate problem. They communicate that the organisation is willing to invest effort in understanding the customer.

The adviser who appears rushed may unintentionally communicate the opposite.

The customer is unlikely to think, “The organisation is managing average handling time targets.” Instead, they may conclude that the organisation is not particularly interested in them.

Whether that conclusion is fair is almost beside the point. Customer relationships are shaped by perception as much as reality.

When Efficiency Becomes the Goal

There is an old observation in organisational psychology that people rarely respond to metrics themselves. They respond to the behaviours that those metrics encourage.

Few advisers begin their careers wanting to rush customers. Most enter customer service because they enjoy helping people solve problems. They derive satisfaction from being useful, knowledgeable and supportive. These motivations are not accidental. They are often precisely the qualities organisations seek during recruitment.

Yet performance measures exert a powerful influence on behaviour – including handling time.

When advisers know they are being evaluated against handling time, every conversation acquires a second objective. Alongside helping the customer, there is a need to manage the clock.

This does not usually result in obviously poor service. Experienced advisers become remarkably skilled at balancing competing demands. The challenge lies in the countless micro-decisions made throughout the day.

“How deeply should I probe this issue?”; “Should I explore that additional concern?”; “Can I afford another minute here?”

Over hundreds of interactions, these decisions accumulate.

Economist Charles Goodhart captured this phenomenon decades ago when he observed that once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The insight has become known as Goodhart’s Law, and it highlights a challenge familiar to many contact centres: Metrics that are useful for understanding system performance can become problematic when used to drive individual behaviour.

At a contact centre level, AHT can highlight process inefficiencies, knowledge gaps, training needs and operational bottlenecks. It helps leaders understand how demand flows through the system.

At an individual level, however, the metric can encourage advisers to optimise for speed rather than effectiveness.

The irony is that effectiveness is often what ultimately drives efficiency. Customers who leave a conversation with genuine confidence are less likely to call back, escalate complaints, or seek clarification through alternative channels.

A shorter call is not always a cheaper call if it creates additional work tomorrow.

This challenge may become even more significant over the next decade. Not because handling time will disappear, but because the nature of the interactions reaching human advisers is changing.

The Opportunity Hidden Within Automation

Perhaps the future of AHT becomes most interesting when viewed alongside the rise of automation and artificial intelligence.

For years, contact centres have pursued efficiency by attempting to reduce the duration of human interactions. Today, technology offers a different route. Increasingly capable self-service tools can absorb many of the straightforward enquiries that once consumed adviser time.

The question is what organisations choose to do with the capacity that creates.

One option is to view every minute saved as an opportunity for further cost reduction. Another is to recognise that the interactions reaching human advisers are changing.

As routine transactions migrate towards automation, the conversations that remain often involve greater uncertainty, greater complexity, and greater emotional significance. They are less about information and more about interpretation.

In this environment, the adviser role becomes less of a processor and more of a guide. The adviser becomes a source of confidence rather than purely a source of information. Another way to view this is that the role is less about transactions and more about trust.

If that is true, then perhaps the objective is not to make every conversation shorter. Perhaps it is to give advisers sufficient freedom to exercise judgement about how much time a conversation genuinely requires.

This does not mean abandoning efficiency. It means recognising that efficiency and effectiveness are not always the same thing.

The most successful contact centres may ultimately be those that use automation to remove unnecessary human effort while preserving space for meaningful human connection.

Technology is becoming increasingly capable of answering questions. The enduring value of people lies in helping others understand the answers.

What Are We Optimising For?

For contact centre leaders, the challenge may not be whether AHT should be measured, but whether it is being used in the right place.

As automation absorbs routine demand and human interactions become increasingly complex, AHT may be at its most valuable when viewed as a measure of system performance rather than individual performance.

Rather than focusing on how quickly advisers can move customers through a conversation, are organisations prepared to use the efficiency created by technology to give advisers the freedom to have the conversations that matter?

A baker who judged every loaf solely by how quickly it emerged from the oven would soon discover that speed and quality are not the same thing. Contact centres face a similar challenge.

Average Handling Time remains a useful measure because time matters. Customers value efficiency, and organisations must operate within real constraints. Yet the purpose of a customer conversation is not to minimise its duration, but to achieve an outcome.

Sometimes that outcome requires four minutes. Sometimes it requires seven.

The skill lies not in making every conversation shorter, but in giving each conversation the time it genuinely needs.

After all, a stopwatch can tell us how long an interaction lasted. It cannot tell us whether the customer left with confidence, trust, or the belief that somebody genuinely understood their problem.

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