Explore recipe: Time Tracking app - Measuring ticket handling time

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All Suites | Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus

Support with | Explore Professional or Enterprise

In this recipe, you'll learn how to report on handling time per ticket. You can use this information to analyze agent performance when a ticket is handled mostly by the same agent, or to report on the time your team spent supporting a specific end user or organization.

Tip: You can also report on handling time per update, instead of per ticket. See Time Tracking app - Measuring update handling time.

This recipe contains the following topics:

What you'll need

Creating the standard calculated metric

Measuring ticket handling time by ticket ID

Measuring ticket handling time by month and organization

Related articles:

Time Tracking app - Metrics you need to be measuring

Explore recipe: Time tracking app - Measuring update handling time

What you'll need

Skill level: Intermediate

Time required: 20 minutes

Zendesk Explore Professional or Enterprise

Editor or Admin permissions (See Giving users access to Explore)

Time Tracking app installed and configured (See Setting up the Time Tracking app)

Note: The Time Tracking app stores data in custom numeric fields that are synchronized with Explore on a schedule. If you’ve installed the Time Tracking app recently, the data required to build necessary calculated metrics might not yet be synced with Explore.

Creating the standard calculated metric

To report on ticket handling time, you'll first need to create a standard calculated metric.

Note: The Time Tracking app must be installed and configured before the metric and reports described in this recipe will work. See Setting up the Time Tracking app. If the app hasn’t been configured, the metric won’t return any values.

To create the standard calculated metric

In Explore, click the Reports () icon.

In the Reports library, click New report.

On the Select a dataset page, click Support > Support - Tickets, then click Start report. The report builder opens.

Click the Calculations menu (), and select Standard calculated metric.

Enter a name for your calculated metric, such as Ticket handling time (min), or hours.

In the Formula field, enter the formula below:
VALUE(Total time spent (sec))/60
If you want to measure ticket handling time in hours, use the following formula instead:
VALUE(Total time spent (sec))/60/60

Tip: If you're working in a language other than English, see this article to help you enter Explore formulas in your language.

Click Save.

(Optional) Determine which aggregators should be available for the metric. For additional help, see Setting a metric's default and visible aggregators.

In the Metrics panel, click Add.

From the list of attributes, expand the Calculated metrics folder, find your calculated metric, then click the pencil icon () next to it.

In the top-right corner of the Standard calculated metric panel, click Options > Edit aggregators.

Set the following aggregators as visible: SUM, AVG, MIN, MAX, and MED.

(Optional) Change the default aggregator.

Click Save.

(Optional) Customize the metric's display format. For additional help, see Customizing the result format.

In the Metrics panel, click Add.

From the list of attributes, expand the Calculated metrics folder, find your calculated metric, then click the pencil icon () next to it.

In the top-right corner of the Standard calculated metric panel, click Options > Edit display format.

In the first drop-down, select Custom.

Customize the metric's display format as needed. For example, you could add the suffix "min" or "hrs," or increase the number of decimal places.

Click Save.

Now that you've created your standard calculated metric, you can use it in other reports in the Support: Tickets dataset. See below for two example reports.

Measuring ticket handling time by ticket ID

In this example report, you'll use the standard calculated metric you created above to produce a list of tickets with their handling time and some additional attributes.

To create the report

In Explore, click the Reports () icon.

In the Reports library, click New report.

On the Select a dataset page, click Support > Support - Tickets, then click Start report. The report builder opens.

In the Metrics panel, click Add.

From the list of metrics, select Calculated metrics > Ticket handling time (min) (or whatever you named the metric you created above), then click Apply.

In the Rows panel, click Add and select the following attributes and then click Apply:

Ticket > Ticket ID

Assignee > Assignee name

Requester > Requester name

Time - Ticket solved > Ticket solved - Date

Click the Ticket solved - Date attribute you just added and filter by the time period you want to see. For help, see Filtering by an attribute in the Columns or Rows panel.

Click the Visualization type menu () and select Table.

You'll end up with a table that looks something like the following:

Measuring ticket handling time by month and organization

In this example report, you'll use the standard calculated metric you created above to produce a chart showing total ticket handling time and average ticket handling time by month and organization.

To create the report

In Zendesk Explore, click the Reports () icon.

In the Reports library, click New report.

On the Select a dataset page, click Support > Support - Tickets, then click Start report. The report builder opens.

In the Metrics panel, click Add.

From the list of metrics, select Calculated metrics, find Ticket handling time (min) (or whatever you named the metric you created above), and click the arrow to the right of its name.

Select SUM and AVG, then click Apply.

Click the Visualization type menu () and select Line.

Click the AVG(Ticket handling time (min)) metric you just added, then select Dual. (This option won't appear until you've selected the Line visualization.)

In the Columns panel, click Add.

From the list of attributes, select the following attributes and then click Apply:

Time - Ticket created > Ticket created - Year

Time - Ticket created > Ticket created - Month

Click the Ticket created - Month attribute you just added and filter by the time period you want to see. For help, see Filtering by an attribute in the Columns or Rows panel.

In the Rows panel, click Add.

From the list of attributes, select Ticket organization > Ticket organization name, then click Apply.

Click the Ticket organization name attribute you just added, select the organizations you want to report on, and click Apply. These organizations will appear in the row selector in the top-left corner of the report visualization.

(Optional) Adjust the chart colors, labels, and more using the Chart configuration menu (). For help, see Customizing your chart.

You'll end up with a chart that looks like this: