5 Things You Can Learn From Your Ticketing System Reporting

How does your company track and measure the effectiveness of your ticketing system?

Reporting is an important feature to pay attention to because through reporting, you can gauge the “health” of your customer ticketing experience. You can track key metrics and take action to improve them.

We include reporting features with JitBit to enable you to offer the finest possible customer service. Let’s look at what you can learn:

Free download: Best practices for ticketing system reporting

Benefits of your ticketing system reporting

First of all, why is it so important to have reporting on your ticketing? What can you get from it? Here are a few key benefits:

1. Accountability. Are expectations of performance standards being met? You need to be able to view and compare metrics for your users and get to the bottom of any issues. For example, if your metrics are lower than expected, it may indicate an issue that needs attention, such as a need for more employee training.
2. Transparency. There’s often a need within businesses to have a transparent system where managers can demonstrate how well it is working. Reporting helps you to show that you are tracking the things that matter and actively working to make improvements.
3. Proof of improvements. You might have a feeling that you’re making improvements, but metrics tell you if you’re right or not. You should be able to compare your KPIs over time and track how you’re doing.
4. Meet audit requirements. You may have cause to audit ticketing logs or it may be required as part of governance in your company. The ability to track and audit can also provide useful data for things like performance reviews.

It comes back to that expression “what gets measured, gets managed.”

Key metrics of your ticketing system

Here are some key metrics you should be tracking. All of these are able to be reviewed via JitBit’s reporting function:

Average response speed

This is pretty straightforward, on average, how long do customers wait for a response? Is your average speed in line with your SLAs?

Average resolution speed

How quickly are tickets resolved? Your report shows you the average overall duration of a ticket, from when it was opened to when it was closed.

How individual agents perform

There are many reasons to know how individual agents perform. It gives you an indicator of whether someone may require more training, whether agents have access to all the information they need and how their performance review might stack up.

Customer ticket numbers and allocation

Do you have particular “frequent flyers” generating tickets? Reporting can show you which customers generate the most tickets. This can help you to pinpoint any who might need some extra attention. For example, if someone is often frustrated, you can proactively intervene and perhaps prevent churn.  Frequent tickets can also be an indicator of people who are active users of your product or service.

Ticket category, tag and priority breakdown

Why are people requesting help and how urgent is it? Do you have certain categories that are always coming up? This can indicate that you may need some better knowledge base resources in that area.

Your custom fields breakdown

If you have included your own custom fields on your tickets, you can get reporting to show these too.

Average ticket numbers

You can break down the average number of tickets you usually get per month, week or day. This can help with things like forecasting staffing needs.

Your busiest periods

It’s important to know when your busiest periods are so you can plan to staff accordingly. Reporting can show you the busiest day of the month, the busiest day of the week and the busiest hour of the day.

Customer satisfaction

Your ticketing system is all about serving customers (whether your system is internal or external), so it’s important to track how well you’re doing in the eyes of the customer. Your customers can rate how satisfied they are after their ticket has been closed.

“Ping-pong” rate

The “ping pong” rate refers to the average number of back and forth messages it takes to close a ticket. This can be a sign of the complexity of the ticket, but it can also be a sign that the agent needs more training to resolve the issue faster. One thing we know about customers is that too much back and forth irritates them!

5 things you can learn

What can you take away from these reports? Some key insights:

#1. Know who your high-performers are

You can identify people who may be suitable to train others or to move into supervisory roles. You can also gauge how performance reviews should be graded based on real data.

#2. Identify areas for improvement

Sometimes you’ll find a training issue, but sometimes you might find a process issue in your company too. For example, any tickets that take longer than you’d expect to resolve should be examined for this. Is the cause something systemic in your business?

#3. Identify target areas for user education

When you keep track of categories and tags, you start to build a picture of those that come up the most often. This can give you an indicator of any areas where you may need to build up your educational resources.

For example, maybe there are questions that come up that haven’t been answered on your knowledge base. These could also be a good place to start with your customer emails or social media posts.

#4. Keep an eye on customer sentiment

Your customer satisfaction ratings as well as any other feedback they give can be tracked over time to understand their overall sentiment about your company.

For example, if you experience a cluster of poor ratings at a particular time, can you clearly associate that with certain factors? A change in how you do things, or perhaps a period where you had a lot of new agents, for example.

You might also look to see whether there is any correlation between poor ratings and things like ping-pong rate, or certain categories of ticket.

#5. Help with forecasting staffing needs

Your metrics will show you your busy periods as well as the average amount of time taken to resolve a ticket. From this data, you can plan ahead for staffing needs to ensure that you don’t see a drop in service levels over your busiest times.

This data may also be useful if you need to make a business case for more staff with a senior manager. You will be able to make evidence-based recommendations for your hiring needs.

Download here: Best practices for ticketing system reporting

Final thoughts

Your ticketing system reporting can provide you with many valuable insights. We recommend that you make a practice of reviewing your metrics on a regular basis, so that you can proactively make any improvements.

Reporting gives you something concrete to base decisions on, rather than simply a feeling or anecdote. It can be used as evidence to back a business case or for auditing purposes.

Importantly, reporting is about doing the right thing by your customers. Improving your ticketing system metrics should result in improvements to your overall service.