First response time benchmarks for B2B SaaS support
The median software company replies to a support ticket in 46 minutes and 51 seconds. The fastest fifth reply in 2 minutes and 20 seconds. The bottom tier takes 6 hours and 10 minutes. All three figures appear in one table in Freshworks’ Customer Service Benchmark Report 2025, built from the product data of more than 32,000 companies.
Freshworks publishes those tiers rather than one industry average. With a spread that wide, a single average would be misleading and describe none of the three groups.
Key takeaways
- The median software and internet company answers a ticket in 46 minutes 51 seconds, against 2 minutes 20 seconds for the top 20% and 6 hours 10 minutes for the slowest tier (Freshworks’ software and internet cut of a dataset covering 32,000+ companies and 1.2 billion tickets).
- On messaging channels the median software company answers in 32 seconds, about 88 times faster than the ticket median.
- Atlassian’s target first response on its most severe cloud issues is 2 business hours, 1 hour or 30 minutes depending on the plan, so the response time a customer gets is partly set by the plan they bought.
- 62% of the 1,000 companies SuperOffice emailed never replied. A company that never replies records no response time, so it doesn’t affect the average.
- Replying within an hour meets the expectations of 88% of consumers, from Toister Performance Solutions’ survey of more than 3,200 people.
What the benchmark tables say
Freshworks sorts companies into three tiers. Trendsetters are the top 20%, Performers are the median, and Aspirants are the remaining companies. The 2025 edition covers more than 32,000 companies, 1.2 billion tickets and 138 million conversations, from anonymized product data between January and December 2024 plus a survey of over 100 practitioners.
Software and Internet is the closest cut to B2B SaaS the report publishes. Freshworks benchmarks tickets separately from messaging, which it calls conversations and which covers channels such as web chat, in-app and social messaging.
| Metric | Trendsetters (top 20%) | Performers (median) | Aspirants |
|---|---|---|---|
| First response, tickets | 2m 20s | 46m 51s | 6h 10m |
| First response, messaging | 10s | 32s | 2m 40s |
| First assignment, tickets | Instantaneous | Instantaneous | 2h 2m |
| Average response across a ticket | 4m 40s | 1h 8m | 7h 17m |
| Resolution, tickets | 38m 6s | 7h 14m | 42h 30m |
Across all industries in the same report the median ticket first response is one hour flat, so software runs about 13 minutes faster than the all-industry median.
Freshworks reports average response time separately from first response time, and at the median the average across a whole ticket runs 21 minutes longer than the first reply. A team saying “about an hour” might mean either.
Who measured what
The sources behind these numbers answer different questions.
Freshworks reads its own product data. It can only see companies running its helpdesk, on tickets somebody eventually answered. Its first response time counts the first agent reply and excludes automated messages.
SuperOffice emailed 1,000 companies two questions and scored what came back. 62% never responded. The average response took 12 hours and 10 minutes, and only 20% of the companies answered the questions in full on the first reply.
Toister Performance Solutions asked customers what they want. In March 2020 it surveyed more than 3,200 people in the US, UK and Canada. Nearly a third expect a reply within an hour, and replying within an hour meets the expectations of 88%. Those are consumers rather than business buyers, so the survey shows what people expect of a reply in general, not what a B2B contract promises.
Zendesk documents exactly how it measures first reply time. First reply time is “the time between ticket creation and the first public agent comment after that”, and Zendesk stores it in both calendar hours and business hours.
Whether a team measures in calendar hours or business hours decides whether you can compare two numbers at all. Two teams both reporting a four-hour first response have told you different things if one counts calendar hours and the other counts a nine-hour working day. Measured in business hours of 9am to 6pm on weekdays, a ticket arriving at 6pm on Friday reaches four business hours at 1pm on Monday, which is 67 hours for the customer.
Plan tier sets the number before anyone answers
B2B SaaS vendors such as Atlassian and Twilio publish their own first response targets, and the target moves with the plan.
Atlassian targets an initial response on the most severe cloud issues within 2 business hours on Standard, 1 hour on Premium and 30 minutes on Enterprise. Standard runs 9 hours a day Monday to Friday. Premium and Enterprise cover severity 1 around the clock.
Twilio guarantees no response time on its Developer plan. Production guarantees 3 business hours on a business-critical issue. Business and Personalized guarantee 1 hour, 24/7.
So a vendor’s overall first response time partly reflects which plans its customers bought. Two companies with identical support teams can report different numbers if their customers are on different plans, and anyone benchmarking against an industry figure is measuring themselves against a blend of contracts they can’t see.
What skews a first response time
The distribution runs long to the right. Add one 14-hour overnight ticket to a hundred five-minute replies and the mean goes from 5 minutes to over 13. The median stays at 5.
Silence doesn’t show up in the average. SuperOffice found 62% of companies never replied. No reply means no first response time, so the worst performers drop out of the mean rather than dragging it up. Helpdesk benchmarks have the same gap, because a ticket nobody answered has no first response time to count.
Business hours and calendar hours go by the same name. Zendesk stores both, and the Freshworks report doesn’t say which one its figures use.
What counts as a first response differs by vendor. Freshworks excludes automated messages. Zendesk counts replies from people on your team, not from bots or its AI agents, and in its messaging channels it makes one exception for legacy autoreplies that recommend articles. Zendesk’s SLA reports have a gap. “Tickets set to Solved immediately fulfill all active SLA targets associated with the ticket,” so a ticket an agent closes without ever answering the customer still shows the first reply target as met. Check your own setup before you compare your number to anybody’s.
The wait starts before anyone has seen the message
Freshworks reports a first assign time next to first response. For software companies in the bottom tier, a ticket waits 2 hours and 2 minutes before it has an owner, out of a first response of 6 hours and 10 minutes. On those two figures, a third of the customer’s wait passes before anybody is responsible for answering. Trendsetters and Performers both assign instantaneously, which points to assignment rules rather than a person reading the queue.
Messages also arrive when nobody is on shift. Microsoft’s analysis of trillions of Microsoft 365 signals found the average employee now sends or receives more than 50 messages outside core business hours, and by 10pm 29% of active workers are back in their inboxes. B2B support requests come from those same employees.
Some B2B support never reaches a queue at all. Slack said in 2022 that more than 100,000 organizations use Slack Connect, including 77 of the Fortune 100. A question sent straight to an account manager, or asked in a shared channel no helpdesk is connected to, has no ticket, no timer and no assignment step. Helpdesk telemetry can’t see any of it, but the customer is still waiting.
So for messages outside the queue, response time is a routing problem before it’s a staffing problem. The wait depends on whether anyone is watching the place the message arrives when it arrives.
What to measure
- Report the median and the 90th percentile, because the median alone hides the slowest tickets. Drop the mean, or publish all three.
- Put “calendar hours” or “business hours” in the same sentence as the number.
- Split by channel before comparing to anyone. A ticket median and a chat median aren’t the same metric.
- Split by plan, because your contracts may already do.
- Count what arrived somewhere other than the queue. Messages in shared channels and in people’s own inboxes are missing from helpdesk reporting, and the customer is waiting on them too.
Where we fit
this+that reads messages as they arrive across Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, and WhatsApp Business, turns what they ask for into tasks in DoBox, and routes each task to a workflow or to a person. For a support inbox, the Support Triage Desk workflow comes prebuilt: it labels and queues each message and drafts a first reply. The Support Reply Composer agent writes replies from the documented answers in your brain and cites the pages it used, or tells you when the documentation is missing. A draft can wait for approval instead of going out on its own.
That shortens the wait before anyone has read the message. A question emailed to an account manager at 11pm is a task with an owner and a draft reply by the time anyone looks, instead of an unread message at 9am.
The first 30 days are free if you want to point it at one mailbox and see what happens.
How we sourced this
Every figure links to the organization that produced it. The Freshworks numbers live in the report PDF, which the company publishes from its overview page. Freshworks reports its own product data, and Zendesk’s contribution is a definition rather than a measurement. Atlassian’s and Twilio’s response times are published support terms. Toister’s numbers are what consumers say they want, and both Toister’s survey and SuperOffice’s email test date from 2020 or earlier. Four figures are our arithmetic on Freshworks’ numbers rather than theirs: messaging running about 88 times faster than the ticket median, software running about 13 minutes ahead of the all-industry median, the 21-minute gap between average and first response, and the share of the wait that passes before a ticket has an owner.
One widely quoted number is missing on purpose. “80% of business buyers expect companies to respond in real time” circulates with Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer attached to it. The sentence appears in neither the second edition nor the 2024 edition. What the second edition does say is that customers are 4.7x more likely to rate real-time messaging important than unimportant, which is a different claim.
For the wider picture on what customers expect versus what businesses deliver, we keep a separate set of customer response time statistics.
Frequently asked questions
What’s the average first response time for customer support in B2B SaaS? The largest benchmark we found, Freshworks’, publishes tiers rather than a single average. Its median for software and internet companies is 46 minutes 51 seconds on tickets and 32 seconds on messaging, from a dataset covering more than 32,000 companies across industries.
What’s a good first response time for a SaaS support team? On tickets, the top 20% of software companies answer within 2 minutes 20 seconds and the median within 47 minutes. On messaging the top 20% answer in 10 seconds. Published vendor terms give a second reference point: Atlassian targets 30 minutes on Enterprise for the most severe issues, and Twilio guarantees one hour on its Business plan for business-critical issues.
Should I report median or average first response time? Median, with the 90th percentile next to it. A handful of overnight tickets move a mean a long way but the median hardly at all.
Does first response time include automated replies? Not in the two definitions we checked. Freshworks excludes automated messages. Zendesk counts replies from people on your team, not from bots or its AI agents, with one exception in messaging for legacy autoreplies that recommend articles. Check your own configuration before comparing your number to a benchmark.
How fast do customers expect a reply? Toister Performance Solutions found that replying within an hour meets the expectations of 88% of the more than 3,200 consumers it surveyed in the US, UK and Canada. On social, about three-quarters expect a reply within 24 hours, per the 2025 Sprout Social Index.