What average speed of answer is and how to read it

Average speed of answer, usually shortened to ASA, is how long an inbound caller waits in the queue before an agent actually picks up. It is the wait-time number, and callers feel it directly because every second of it is spent on hold. A short speed of answer means people get help quickly and walk away happy. A long one means they are stuck listening to hold music, and the longer they wait, the more of them give up before anyone ever speaks to them. ASA is the metric that most directly drives both customer mood and how many callers abandon, which makes it one of the first numbers a queue manager should learn to read.

The simple formula

Average speed of answer = total queue wait time for answered calls divided by the number of answered calls. It counts only the seconds between a call entering the queue and an agent connecting. It stops the instant the agent picks up, so it never includes Talk time or the after-call Wrap-up. Keep this straight: ASA is a wait metric, not a conversation metric. The two are easy to mix up because they sit on the same report.

Where VICIdial surfaces it

On the Inbound Daily Report, AVG ANSWER SPEED is the average amount of time a caller waited in queue before an agent answered, which is ASA exactly. The standard inbound report also gives you the Total and Average Queue time across the selected in-groups, plus a breakdown in seconds of how long hold and drop calls waited before they were answered or dropped. So you can read ASA both as a single average and as a distribution, which is more useful than the average alone when a handful of long waits are skewing things. ASA is the engine behind your Service level: speed of answer up, service level down.

If you want the queue-wait concept in more depth, see how queue time works in VICIdial.

Where the timer runs

flowchart LR
  A[Call enters queue] --> B[ASA clock starts]
  B --> C{Agent picks up?}
  C -->|Yes| D[ASA clock stops]
  C -->|No, caller leaves| E[Counted as abandon, not ASA]
  D --> F[Talk time begins]

The ASA clock covers only the wait. It starts when the call hits the queue and stops the moment an agent answers. Calls that abandon never finish an ASA timer; they feed the abandon stats instead.

A good benchmark, honestly

As general guidance, many teams aim for an ASA around 20 to 30 seconds, often paired with a service-level target like answering 80 percent of calls within that window. These are common goalposts, not absolute rules, and a premium support line may chase a tighter wait while a low-priority queue tolerates more. Watch ASA together with your Abandonment rate, because they move as a pair: longer waits push more callers to hang up. If ASA creeps up, add agents at peak, smooth your routing, or offer an In-queue callback so people stop holding.

For how ASA fits with the rest of your inbound numbers, see our guide to VICIdial reports.

Get a tuned dialer fast

A fast speed of answer needs a queue that routes cleanly from the first second. VICIfast provisions a tuned VICIdial box in under 40 seconds so your inbound timers are accurate right away. See pricing to get going.