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Contact handle time is the average time that an agent spends on an inbound contact, including talk time, chat time, wrap time, and after call or after chat work time (ACW).  For non-live contacts, such as email, voice mail, and faxes, the contact handle time is the average time that an Agent spends working on the contact before escalating or closing out the ticket.

Please note that contact handle time is not the same as mean time to resolve (MTTR).  MTTR, sometimes called cycle time, is the average elapsed time from the beginning of an incident or service request, until the ticket associated with the incident or service request is closed out.  So while the total handle time for an incident may be only 10 minutes, unless the ticket is resolved on first contact the MTTR will be longer than the handle time.  In fact, the MTTR can be substantially longer than the handle time depending upon how much after call work is required to resolve the issue, and whether the ticket is escalated to another level of support for resolution.

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Jeffrey Rumburg

Jeff Rumburg is a co-founder and Managing Partner of MetricNet, where he is responsible for global strategy, product development, and financial operations for the company. As a leading expert in benchmarking and re-engineering, Mr. Rumburg authored a best selling book on benchmarking, and has been retained as a benchmarking expert by such well known companies as American Express, Hewlett-Packard, General Motors, IBM, and Sony. Mr. Rumburg was honored in 2014 by receiving the Ron Muns Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the IT Service and Support industry. Prior to co-founding MetricNet, Mr. Rumburg was president and founder of The Verity Group, an international management consulting firm specializing in IT benchmarking. While at Verity, Mr. Rumburg launched a number of syndicated benchmarking services that provided low cost benchmarks to more than 1,000 corporations worldwide. Mr. Rumburg has also held a number of executive positions at META Group, and Gartner. As a vice president at Gartner, Mr. Rumburg led a project team that reengineered Gartner’s global benchmarking product suite. And as vice president at META Group, Mr. Rumburg’s career was focused on business and product development for IT benchmarking. Mr. Rumburg’s education includes an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School, an M.S. magna cum laude in Operations Research from Stanford University, and a B.S. magna cum laude in Mechanical Engineering. He is author of A Hands-On Guide to Competitive Benchmarking: The Path to Continuous Quality and Productivity Improvement, and has taught graduate-level engineering and business courses.

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