Analyzing the metrics that matter to improve customer support


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Using Explore, you can analyze your customer service experience to identify areas
where you're exceeding expectations and areas that might need improvement. You can
then use this information to improve the effectiveness of your team and your
customer support.
Learn which metrics are important to monitor, how to report on them in Explore, what
trends to look for, and how to take action on this information.
This article contains the following topics:

How many tickets are we solving?
What are the most common ticket areas?
How much work do we have?
How long do customers wait for a first reply?
How long do tickets take to resolve?
How often are solved tickets reopened?
How satisfied are customers?
More resources
Join the conversation!




How many tickets are we solving?

The number of tickets solved gives you a quick indication of how your team is doing.
It's most useful for examining overall trends, as some tickets are quickly solved
while others take longer. Monitoring this metric over time helps you evaluate your
team's performance and decide your resourcing needs.


Viewing prebuilt reports (Lite and Professional)

The Tickets tab of the Zendesk Support
dashboard gives you an at-a-glance view of your solved, unsolved,
created, and reopened tickets.

Additionally, the Assignee activity report on the Assignee activity tab of the Zendesk Support
dashboard shows your top ticket solvers, along with a wealth of other
information.




Creating your own reports (Professional)

The Tickets dataset contains the metrics
and attributes you need to create your own reports about solved tickets.
The following Explore recipes give you some great starting points for creating
your reports:

Reporting on created and solved
tickets
Daily ticket activity in the last 30
days
Solved tickets this year compared to last
year

For a full list of recipes, see Explore recipes reference.



What to look for

As you look at your reports, focus on the following information:

The Solved tickets metric for both the whole team and individual
agents.
The average values over a period of time (for example, a month). Some days,
agents will be over or under the target.
The number of solved tickets compared with the number of open tickets. This
shows how well the team is keeping up with the ticket queue.




How to use the results

The following table gives some examples of how you can use solved ticket reports
to help improve your team's efficiency:








If you see this
Do this




Ticket volumes are consistently high.


Consider hiring more agents. Look for patterns of
particularly busy or quiet times and staff
accordingly.
Consider more training for your agents.
Look for common problem areas in tickets. Meet with
product managers to see if the product could be
improved. Consider setting up an About field (see What are the
most common ticket areas?).
Consider setting up a
knowledge base to enable customers to serve
themselves. A great knowledge base means that many of
your customers will find the answer to their problem
without ever opening a ticket.




Ticket volumes are consistently low.


You might be able to reduce your number of agents.




Some agents have low solve rates.


Check which tickets the agent has been working on. They
could be particularly time-consuming problems.
If an agent has a consistently low solve rate, they
might require more product training.










What are the most common ticket areas?

Feedback from customers can help you improve your products and your customers'
experiences. Take advantage of this feedback by categorizing your support requests
into product areas. Then, you can easily see which product areas generate the most
support issues.
To categorize your support requests, add a custom field to your tickets and support request
form. This field can contain as many values as you want, and you can call
the field whatever you want. In this example, the field is called Product and
contains three values.

To see how Zendesk categorizes tickets, see The 'About' Field.


Viewing prebuilt reports (Lite and Professional)

Explore doesn't include custom fields on prebuilt dashboards. However, you can
report on custom ticket fields by creating your own reports.



Creating your own reports (Professional)

The Tickets dataset includes each of your
custom fields as an attribute. For more information, see Reporting with custom fields.
To create a report showing areas with the most tickets

In Explore, create a new report using the
Support - Tickets dataset.
In the Metrics panel, select Tickets > Tickets.
In the Rows panel, select Ticket custom fields >
customfieldname. customfieldname is
the name of the custom field you created to categorize your
tickets.


The following Explore recipes give you some great starting points for creating
your reports:

Reporting on custom ticket
fields
Reporting on nested drop-down
fields




What to look for

As you look at your reports, focus on the following information:

The number of tickets in each area compared to the overall ticket
volume.
The average time it takes to solve a ticket in each area.
The average CSAT rating for tickets in each area.




How to use the results

The following table gives some examples of how the category can help improve your
customer support:








If you see this
Do this




One category generates significantly more tickets than
others.


Work with product teams to identify whether the product
area could be improved.

Create a knowledge
base with information to help customers use
that area of the product.




Many tickets are not assigned to a category.


Train your agents to categorize tickets by selecting
from the list of predefined categories.
Make the category field mandatory, meaning a category
must be chosen before you can proceed.

Add the field to your
support request form so your customers can
choose the relevant category when they submit a support
request.










How much work do we have?

Your ticket backlog provides a general pulse on the health of your support team.
Ticket backlog is defined as all tickets currently in a new, open, pending, or
on-hold state. In other words, it's your unsolved tickets that need work done on
them.
This is an important metric to watch because it provides insight into your incoming
ticket volume and how well you keep up, given your resources.


Viewing prebuilt reports (Lite and Professional)

The Backlog tab of the Zendesk Support
dashboard includes prebuilt reports that measure your daily and
weekly ticket backlog.




Creating your own reports (Professional)

The Backlog history dataset contains the
metrics and attributes you need to create your own reports about your ticket
backlog.
The following Explore recipes give you some great starting points for creating
your reports:

Backlog tickets by month
Top problem tickets by unsolved
incidents




What to look for

As you look at your reports, focus on the following information:


Ticket backlog volume cross-referenced with ticket age and first reply
time. A large backlog isn't necessarily a bad thing if your team is
capable of a high throughput.
Ticket priority cross-referenced with ticket status. A large backlog may
or may not be bad, but one with many high-priority tickets probably
is.
Historical backlog trends. For example, what are your busiest months?
Which of your agents are performing the best?
Whether there are multiple support requests from the same customer, or
in the same categories.


Remember that speed is important, but not at the expense of quality. Sometimes,
support issues take longer to solve than the customer expects or longer than the
performance targets you’ve set for your team. However, the longer it takes to
solve a customer’s issue, the more likely customer satisfaction will suffer.



How to use the results

The following table gives some examples of how examining your ticket backlog can
help improve your customer support:








If you see this
Do this




Your backlog is too big.


This means that customers are waiting longer for help.
Your team can help by keeping the customer informed
about the status and progress of their request.
Are a lot of tickets in a pending state waiting for a
customer response? Consider creating an automation to
remind the customer of the pending status of their
issue. If they don’t respond after a set number of days,
you can automatically resolve the ticket to remove it
from the backlog. For an example, see Zendesk on Zendesk:
Bump Bump Solve.
A backlog consists of both unassigned tickets and
assigned tickets that have not yet been solved. The two
combined equals your total ticket backlog. Try to ensure
that tickets are assigned to someone as quickly as
possible.




You have a lot of high-priority tickets in your
backlog.


Consider creating a trigger that escalates high-priority
tickets to make them visible more quickly. See Creating triggers for
automatic ticket updates and
notifications.
Triage incoming tickets from customers to ensure they've
set the priority field appropriately.
Make sure your agents aren't setting the priority field
incorrectly. If so, they might need further training in
how to categorize requests.




You see multiple support requests from the same customer in
the same category.


Engage directly with the customer to find out what's
wrong.




You get multiple support requests from different customers
for the same problem.


Consider writing a knowledge
base article about the problem.

Engage with the
community in your knowledge base.
Talk to your product development team. Could a product
redesign help to stop problems?










How long do customers wait for a first reply?

First reply time (FRT) is the amount of time from when a ticket is created to when an
agent makes the first reply to the customer. In other words, it measures how long it
takes a real human, not an automated reply, to contact the customer. First reply
time is a good indicator of the efficiency of your team and how well they hold up in
handling fluctuating incoming ticket volumes.
Your performance target for this metric should align with your industry and customer
expectations for first reply times. For example, you might use:

24 hours for support requests submitted using email and online forms
60 minutes for requests submitted using social media

Of course, exceeding these expectations is even better from the customer’s
perspective.


Viewing prebuilt reports (Lite and Professional)


The Efficiency tab of the Zendesk Support
dashboard includes prebuilt reports that measure your first reply
time.





Creating your own reports (Professional)

The Tickets dataset contains the metrics
and attributes you need to create your own reports about first reply time and
efficiency.
The following Explore recipes give you some great starting points for creating
your reports:

Reporting on first reply time
First reply time heatmap
Displaying tickets with a higher than
average first reply time
Creating a ticket first reply date
attribute
Getting resolution times (first reply,
first resolution, and full resolution) based on tags




What to look for

As you look at your reports, focus on the following information:

Look at your ticket volume whenever your first reply time changes. A change
might correspond with a temporary change in ticket volume. Start by looking
at the Tickets and Efficiency tabs in the Zendesk
Support dashboard. If you had a temporary surge from a new product launch or
a major service incident, then this might not be a worrying trend. If you
can predict these surges, that's a great time to bring a bit of extra help
onboard.
If your first reply time is 24 hours on email-submitted requests and your
median number of agent interactions is eight per ticket, then your average
reply time median should be 4 hours or less. Looking at tickets with an
average reply time greater than 4 hours should highlight opportunities for
improving agent performance (such as training or adding self-service
documentation to your knowledge base).
What are your customers telling you about your reply time? Look at your CSAT
ratings and comments.
Monitor first reply time for each of your support channels to ensure that
expectations are being met.
Monitor first reply time by product area if you're using a custom field as
described earlier in this article (see What are the most common ticket areas?).
Monitor average reply time. This is the average amount of time for all
replies to the customer when solving a support request.




How to use the results

The following table gives some examples of how examining your first response
times can help improve your customer support:








If you see this
Do this




First reply times are high.


Look at when you get most of your tickets. An Explore
report using the Tickets metric and the Ticket
created - Hour attribute is a quick way to help
make sure you have support online when your customers
are.
However quickly your team solves emailed tickets,
sometimes live channels can be a faster way for
customers to get help and for you to solve tickets.
When something goes wrong, it's critical to find and
address the issue as quickly as possible. Letting
customers know you're aware and working on a problem is
key to turning a bad situation into a good interaction
with your company.
If your customers serve themselves, then you don't need
to worry about first reply times! Set up a knowledge
base and write articles that address your top
customer pain points. Stay present in your knowledge
base and always answer questions from customers.










How long do tickets take to resolve?

Resolution time is important not just to you and your team. Customers also want their
problems solved quickly. There are several key metrics that indicate how long it
takes for agents to resolve issues:


Resolution time: The time it takes for a support issue to be solved. A
ticket might get solved more than once because it can be reopened before it’s
closed. The time it took to solve the issue the first time is called first
resolution time.

Full resolution time: The time it took to finally solve the ticket.

Agent replies: The number of replies it takes for your agents to solve
the ticket. The faster you can solve a ticket, the happier the customer will
be.

One-touch resolution: Support issues that were resolved in a single
interaction such as a call, ticket reply, or live chat. This has a positive
impact on customer satisfaction and helps reduce support costs.



Viewing prebuilt reports (Lite and Professional)

The Efficiency tab of the Zendesk Support
dashboard includes prebuilt reports that measure how long your
tickets take to solve.




Creating your own reports (Professional)

The Tickets dataset contains the metrics
and attributes you need to create your own reports about first reply time and
efficiency.
The following Explore recipes give you some great starting points for creating
your reports:

First assignment to first resolution
time
Reporting on full resolution
time
Average ticket resolution time without
pending or on-hold time
Getting resolution times (first reply,
first resolution, and full resolution) based on tags
Time Tracking app: metrics you need to be
measuring




What to look for

Metrics that can help you understand the time and effort that went into solving a
ticket include:


Handle time: The time that an agent spends working on a single
support interaction. In Support, handle time is captured using the Time Tracking app. Explore can
report on this data using the custom fields Total time spent, Avg time spent
per ticket, and Avg time spent per update. For details, see Time Tracking app: metrics you need to be
measuring.

Agent touches: An update that an agent makes to a ticket. This
includes changes of ticket status, adding comments, and others. With
Explore, you can report on agent touches using the Agent replies
metric and Agent replies brackets attribute.

Requester wait time: The time a customer waits for their issue to be
resolved. This is the time that a ticket spends in the New, Open, and
On-hold statuses. During these periods, it’s the support team’s
responsibility to resolve the issue. It's a good indicator of the customer’s
experience of the support interaction.




How to use the results

The following table gives some examples of how examining your full resolution
times can help improve your customer support:








If you see this
Do this




Tickets are taking too long to resolve.


This has a direct effect on customer satisfaction:
People don’t want to wait a long time to have their
problems resolved. However, focusing solely on
resolution time isn’t necessarily a good idea. Speed
doesn’t always equal quality. (For more, see How often
are solved tickets reopened?)
In addition to resolution time, finding the actual time
that the agent spent resolving the issue is important.
Total resolution time doesn’t do that because it
includes stages in the ticket lifecycle when the agent
isn’t working on it. For example, when it’s sent back to
the customer for information and put in a Pending
status.




You have a high proportion of one-touch resolution
tickets.


This might indicate that you have lots of low-complexity
support issues that could be better handled with
self-service. Agents should work on more complex issues,
not those that a customer can easily solve on their own
by reading FAQs.




Tickets have a high proportion of agent touches.


This might indicate that the agent needs more training
because it takes them more touches than the team average
to solve tickets.










How often are solved tickets reopened?

A reopen occurs when a ticket's status is changed from Solved back to Open.
When tickets are reopened, this might indicate that agents aren’t fully solving the
customer’s support issues. This might be because agents are concentrating on
first-touch resolutions and speed over quality. It’s good practice to routinely
monitor your team’s ticket reopens.


Viewing prebuilt reports (Lite and Professional)

The Tickets tab of the Zendesk Support
dashboard contains information about reopened tickets.




Creating your own reports (Professional)

The Tickets dataset contains the metrics
and attributes you need to create your own reports about reopened tickets.



What to look for



The total number of reopens
The percentage of tickets with reopens





How to use the results

The following table gives some examples of how examining your ticket reopens can
help improve your customer support:








If you see this
Do this




The percentage of tickets being reopened is high.


Is this an escalated issue? Ticket reopens are more
likely when agents deal with more complex support
issues, so reopens might be higher for escalated
tickets.
Are your agents sufficiently trained? They might not
have sufficient knowledge to solve more complex
problems.
Was there missing information in the ticket that caused
the agent to misdiagnose the issue? Consider collecting
more information in the customer ticket form if this is
the case.










How satisfied are customers?

Every time you interact with a customer, consider measuring their satisfaction with a Customer Satisfaction
Survey (CSAT), a short survey sent to the customer after their problem is
solved.
Tracking CSAT helps you spot trends that might be affecting customer satisfaction.
Satisfaction ratings are also key performance indicators for your agents because
each rating received is associated with the agent who solved the customer’s problem.
These can be averaged to give each agent an overall CSAT score.
At Zendesk, we simply ask if the interaction was good or bad. If customers want to
give more feedback, they can add a comment.
Examples of metrics you can track include:

A customer’s CSAT rating over time
CSAT ratings by channel, product, or service
Average CSAT ratings for agents and teams



Viewing prebuilt reports (Lite and Professional)

The Satisfaction tab of the Zendesk Support
dashboard includes reports that help you analyze your customer
satisfaction scores.




Creating your own reports (Professional)

The Tickets dataset contains the metrics
and attributes you need to create your own reports about customer
satisfaction.
The following Explore recipes give you some great starting points for creating
your reports:

Reporting on customer satisfaction by
agent
Determining satsifaction scores for your
agents
Determine ticket assignee when
satisfaction rating is given
Display all customer satisfaction
comments
Bad ratings with comments
Reporting on CSAT and one-touch
tickets
Percentage satisfaction score based on
agent replies
Satisfaction trending
year-over-year




What to look for



Compare ticket stats on tickets rated bad to those rated good.
Look for satisfaction ratings with comments.





How to use the results

The following table gives some examples of how examining your customer
satisfaction can help improve your customer support:








If you see this
Do this




You get one or more bad ratings.


Notify managers when you get feedback. You can automate
this using a trigger to notify a manager or group of
managers when a ticket receives a bad rating. Use the
following two trigger
conditions:

Ticket: Satisfaction > Changed to
> Bad


Ticket: Satisfaction > Changed to
> Bad with comment



Give your agents more information about your customers.
Tickets with more touches often have a lower CSAT
rating. Making more customer information available to
your support teams with CRM integrations or custom user
and organization fields can help your team know more
about customers up front. If you can eliminate initial
questions on tickets, that leads to faster resolution
times and more one-touch ticket solves.
Did your agent provide inaccurate information? Was there
an issue with resolution time? Consider categorizing
badly rated tickets based on the reasons why the ticket
was rated the way it was. If it's purely about ticket
handling, resolution time, or workflow issues, then
those are some great projects to work on going
forward.










More resources

By focusing on the metrics that matter, both your organization and your customers
will benefit. All of the reports you've learned about in this article can be used to
help you avoid ongoing issues.
If you're new to Explore and want to learn the basics, read Getting started with Zendesk Explore.
For some great ideas to help you get started with reporting, check out Explore recipes reference.
Finally, to see all of the Explore documentation, start with Zendesk Explore resources.



Join the conversation!

What tools do you use to help measure the success of your support organization? How
have you managed to improve these metrics? Let us know in the comments below.


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