Skip to main content
Metrics type: Supporting MetricsCategory: Support
Median minutes from created_at to close (statistics.time_to_last_close), grouped by the admin who closed the conversation.

At a glance

Resolution Time by Agent is a Support Performance metric tracked from your Intercom workspace. It takes the same created-to-closed clock as Median Resolution Time and splits it by the admin who closed each conversation, over a 30-day window so individual figures are statistically stable. For a small Blitz support team this is a coaching tool, not a stick: it surfaces who is consistently slower than the team — usually because they are handling the gnarliest returns, not because they are underperforming — and who is closing fast enough to mentor others. The alert flags any agent whose median runs at more than twice the team median.

Calculation

Calculated automatically from your Intercom data. Vortex IQ collects conversations closed in the trailing 30 days, reads statistics.time_to_last_close for each, attributes it to the closing admin, converts to minutes, and takes a per-agent median. The team median across all agents is computed in parallel; the alert fires for any agent whose personal median exceeds twice that team median. Agents with too few closed conversations to be meaningful are suppressed so a single ticket cannot mislabel someone as slow.

Worked example

A representative reading for Blitz over 30 days. The team median resolution time is 290 minutes. The card shows four agents: Priya at 240, Sam at 305, Jordan at 270, and Alex at 640 minutes — well past the 2x team median (580 min) line, so Alex’s bar is flagged. Before treating this as a performance issue, you cross-reference Conversations Handled by Agent and CSAT by Agent: Alex handles the lowest volume but the highest CSAT, and almost all of Alex’s tickets carry the “warranty claim” tag — genuinely slow, multi-step cases. The right action is to rebalance warranty work, not to push Alex to close faster. Use Vortex Mind to break Alex’s resolution time down by tag, and Ask Viq to answer “which agent owns the most warranty conversations this month?”

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in Intercom’s own dashboard: Open Reports → Teammate performance and select the “time to close” or “resolution” metric, with a per-teammate breakdown. You can also open any closed conversation to confirm who closed it and the elapsed time. Why the Vortex IQ value may legitimately differ: Cross-connector reconciliation: read this with Conversations Handled by Agent and CSAT by Agent before drawing conclusions about any individual. For divergence investigations, use Vortex Mind.

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Q: How often does Resolution Time by Agent update? The card refreshes on the standard data refresh (typically every 30-60 minutes for live integrations). For a real-time read, force a manual refresh from the dashboard. Q: Why does my Intercom report show a different number? The usual causes are attribution rules (closing admin vs assigned admin), reopen handling, and the business-hours setting. Match these before assuming a real divergence. Q: Is a high bar always bad? No. Read it with volume, topic tags, and CSAT. An agent owning your hardest cases will look “slow” while doing excellent work — which is exactly why this card exists alongside its siblings. Q: Can I customise the alert threshold? Yes. The >2x team median multiplier is configurable per profile in the Alert Rules tab. Tighten or loosen it to match how varied your case mix is.

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Resolution Time by Agent is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Intercom and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.