First Reply Time and Requester Wait Time are key support health metrics. However, they're backward-looking metrics that only get recorded after you've sent a reply.
This means your FRT dashboard shows you how long customers waited yesterday or last week. It doesn't show you the customers waiting for a reply right now.
The tickets currently in your queue are the ones that will determine tomorrow's FRT numbers. If they sit too long, they'll drag your metrics down.
You can't improve a ticket that already waited 6 hours last Tuesday. You can do something about one that's been waiting 4 hours today.
With Geckoboard, you can track when customers have been waiting longer than your target response time. You can display the actual tickets or just show a count of how many are waiting too long.
This video shows you how to monitor tickets without a first reply after 4 hours.
You can even break this down by agent using Interactive views. In the video, Jon has 62 tickets that have been open for more than 4 hours and haven’t received a single response.
You can also get automatic notifications when thresholds are hit so that you can intervene before a slight delay becomes a bigger problem.