Median minutes fromcreated_atto the first admin reply (statistics.time_to_admin_reply), grouped by the team a conversation is assigned to.
At a glance
First-Response Time by Team is a Support Performance metric tracked from your Intercom workspace. It takes the same first-response clock that drives your headline response-time pulse and splits it by team — so you can see whether the Orders team, the Returns team, or general triage is the one keeping customers waiting. For Blitz, where a sports shopper chasing a delayed kit order behaves very differently from one asking about sizing, knowing which queue is slow is the difference between hiring, re-routing, or rewriting a macro. Read it alongside the workspace-wide Median First-Response Time and the First-Response SLA Attainment gauge.
| What it counts | For each Intercom team, the median minutes between a conversation being created and the first reply from an admin on that team. Derived from conversation.statistics.time_to_admin_reply and the conversation’s team_assignee_id. |
| Sample type | API-derived from the Intercom Conversations endpoint, filtered to conversations created in the window and grouped by assigned team. |
| Why it matters | A workspace average hides the queue that is actually failing customers. Splitting by team tells you whether slowness is a staffing problem, a routing problem, or one understaffed specialty. |
| Reading the value | Lower is better. Compare each team’s bar against your target and against the other teams. A single tall bar points to one queue to fix; uniformly tall bars point to a workspace-wide capacity gap. |
| Currency | number |
| Time window | 7D |
| Alert trigger | >240 min |
| Sentiment key | first_response_time |
| Roles | owner, operations |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Intercom data. Vortex IQ pulls conversations created in the trailing 7 days, reads each conversation’steam_assignee_id and its statistics.time_to_admin_reply (seconds from creation to the first admin reply), converts to minutes, then takes the median per team. Conversations with no admin reply yet are excluded from the median — they are still waiting and belong to the Unanswered (awaiting first reply) card. The card renders one horizontal bar per team; the alert fires when any team’s median exceeds 240 minutes.
Worked example
A representative reading for Blitz across a typical trading week. Over the last 7 days the card shows three bars: Orders & Delivery at 38 minutes, Sizing & Product at 52 minutes, and Returns at 271 minutes. The Returns bar trips the>240 min alert. Because the workspace-wide median sits at a comfortable 61 minutes, the slow Returns queue would have been invisible on the headline card. Drilling in, you find Returns is staffed by one part-time agent who only works mornings, so afternoon return requests sit for hours. The fix is a routing rule or a second pair of hands on that queue, not a workspace-wide hiring push. To trace which conversations dragged the median up, open Vortex Mind on the Returns team; to ask “which Returns tickets waited longest yesterday?” use Ask Viq.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
| Card | Why merchants reach for it |
|---|---|
ic_first_response | The workspace-wide first-response median this card decomposes. |
ic_sla_attainment | Turns the same first-response clock into a percent-within-target gauge. |
ic_workload_by_team | Pairs slow teams with how much volume they are carrying. |
ic_resolution_by_agent | Drops from team-level to agent-level to find the individual outlier. |
ic_busiest_hours | Shows whether a team is slow because work arrives when nobody is staffed. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Intercom’s own dashboard: Open Reports → Team performance (or Reports → Conversations and add a Team breakdown). Intercom’s “Median time to first response” metric is the closest equivalent. You can also see per-team backlog and response figures from each team’s Inbox view. Why the Vortex IQ value may legitimately differ:| Reason | Direction | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Business hours vs calendar time. Intercom can report first response against office hours only; Vortex IQ measures wall-clock minutes by default. | Vortex IQ higher | Match Intercom’s report to “calendar time,” or note the office-hours setting. |
Team reassignment. A conversation moved between teams is attributed to its current team_assignee_id in Vortex IQ; Intercom may credit the team that actually replied. | Variable | Check for conversations that changed teams mid-thread. |
| Bot / auto-replies. Intercom may exclude or include Operator/bot first touches differently from Vortex IQ’s “first admin reply” definition. | Variable | Confirm whether bot replies count as first response in both tools. |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Q: How often does First-Response Time by Team 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 two most common reasons are the business-hours setting (Intercom can measure office hours only) and team reassignment (Vortex IQ attributes to the current assigned team). Match those before assuming a real divergence. Q: A team has no bar — why? Either no conversations were assigned to that team in the window, or none of its conversations have received a first admin reply yet (those are counted on the Unanswered card instead). Q: Can I customise the alert threshold? Yes. The>240 min trigger is configurable per profile in the Sensitivity tab. Set it to your published first-response target rather than the generic default.