Definition
Average speed of answer (ASA), also called speed to answer, is the average time between a call entering the queue and being answered by an agent. It is measured across answered calls and usually excludes callers who hung up first.
How average speed of answer works
ASA = total wait time of answered calls / number of answered calls
The clock starts when the call arrives in the queue, or at the first ring, depending on the platform, and stops when an agent picks up. Callers who hang up while waiting are normally left out, since they were never answered. That exclusion makes the figure look better in the worst hour of the day, because the callers who waited longest are the ones missing from it.
The average is the other weak point. Wait times in a queue are skewed: most calls connect quickly and a few wait a long time. An ASA of 15 seconds can hold both a crowd answered in 5 and a handful who waited three minutes. To see the tail, read it with service level, which gives the share answered within a target, and with call abandonment rate, which counts the callers who left.
The metric belongs to a call. It is not the same as a measure of how fast the agent replies inside a conversation.
Why it matters for voice agents
For an AI-answered line the queue is gone, so ASA approaches the time it takes to connect the call, which is a few seconds at most when capacity is free. The number then says more about the phone route than the agent. Where you set the end of the clock changes the result: network pickup, the first audio the caller hears, or the first full sentence.
That last part is not this metric. The delay before the agent starts speaking is time to first audio, measured per turn. Keep the two apart in reports. A line can answer in under a second and still leave the caller in silence for two more.
ASA also stops being the main question once capacity limits arrive. If all agent slots are in use, a caller waits or is turned away, and the average over answered calls hides it. Track rejected and busy calls as their own count.
Example
An illustrative hour (invented numbers): 100 calls are answered after a combined 1,500 seconds of waiting, and 12 callers hang up in the queue.
ASA is 1,500 / 100 = 15 seconds. The 12 abandoned calls do not appear in it, which is why the hour also needs its abandonment rate.