When a ticket is assigned to an agent and sitting in an Open status, that agent owns it. Under Zendesk omnichannel routing, that ownership is not just a reporting detail — every open ticket assigned to an agent counts against their capacity and blocks the router from handing them new work. So the time a ticket spends open during one agent's assignment is the closest thing Zendesk gives you to a true handle time.

Qvasa measures that as assignment session open-status duration, and it is now available per channel — Email, Messaging and Talk — as well as account-wide. An email session and a phone session are not comparable, so a single blended number hides exactly the thing you want to manage.

An assignment session is one continuous stretch during which one agent was assigned to one ticket. If a ticket is passed from Alice to David and later back to Alice, that is three sessions, not two agents — Alice's two turns are measured separately and both count.

Within a session, this metric counts only the time the ticket actually spent in an Open status. Time the session spent Pending, On-hold or Solved is excluded, so waiting on the customer never inflates an agent's number.

If your account uses custom ticket statuses, the widget titles use your own name for the Open status category rather than the word "Open".

Zendesk's omnichannel router allocates work against an agent's capacity per channel. Open tickets already assigned to an agent consume that capacity — an agent holding several long-running open email tickets can be effectively full while looking idle. Measuring how long tickets stay open during each agent's assignment tells you, per channel:

It is deliberately narrower than first reply time or full resolution time: those include the customer's thinking time. This one is agent-owned time.

Every cut comes in an average and a median flavour. Use the median when a handful of very long sessions are dragging the average around.

Each of those four surfaces exists account-wide and pinned to a channel:

The by-agent donut is the fastest way to answer "who is slow on email?" — and, put next to another channel, it shows that the answer is different per channel. The same roster can rank quite differently on Talk than on Email, which is exactly why a blended handle time misleads.

Any dashboard filter you apply narrows these widgets the way you would expect — filtering to a group, a set of agent tags or an agent's email domain filters on the session's own agent, so a colleague who happened to touch the same ticket is not pulled in with them.

The over-time chart buckets each session into the period its assignment ended in — the same population the quick stat and the donut count, just spread across the range. Set Time unit in the widget's configuration to choose the duration unit the y-axis is drawn in (minutes usually reads best for email, seconds for talk).

Edit a dashboard, click Add Widget, then pick the widget type you want and find the metric in its section:

Or type into the search box at the top of the list — "assignment session", "open status duration", "email AHT" and "handle time" all find the family.

The quick stats carry both drill-ins: the magnifying glass opens the tickets behind the number, and the agents drill-in lists every distinct agent whose finished session spent time in the Open status during the range. The charts export to CSV from the widget's own icon.

The channel is stamped onto each assignment session as the session is recorded, and that stamping started when this feature shipped. Sessions recorded before then carry no channel at all, so they belong to none of the three channel cuts.

In practice: for older date ranges the channel widgets can show less volume than the account-wide pair, and the three channels will not add up to the account-wide total. Recent ranges are unaffected, and the gap closes as history rolls forward. The account-wide Average / Median Assignment Session Open-Status Duration widgets always show the complete picture.