You can track the time your support team spent on every Zendesk Support ticket by using the Time Tracking app.
With the app, support managers gain visibility into the actual time spent across all your customer service interactions. While the app tracks time automatically, you’ll need to build a few custom metrics and reports in Insights to analyze your team’s time logs. We’ve created a four-part series to walk you through best practices on how to best report on time spent:
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The most costly support issues for your organization (this article)
This final article in the series walks you through how you can report on the various issues that are brought up in your Zendesk account and exactly how much of your team's time is being spent on each issue.
For general information on setting up the Time Tracking app, see Setting up Time Tracking .
What kinds of issues are most common and how much time do my agents spend answering them?
Skill Level: Advanced
Time Required: 20 minutes
Ingredient list
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1 custom ticket field to track issue type
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2 custom metrics to track Total time spent and Average time per ticket ( link to metric recipe )
Instructions
- Click Reporting in the sidebar, then click the Insights tab. Click the GoodData link in the top right corner of the panel.
- In Insights, in the top menu, click Reports , then click Create Report.
- Open the What menu and select # Tickets , Total time spent (min), and Avg time spent per ticket (min).
- Open the How menu and select Issue Type. Note that this name might be different if you've chosen a different name for your custom ticket field.
- Click Filter , then Select from a list of values. Create a new filter that says Issue type Isn’t (empty value).
- To ensure that your data stays accurate and you can see the effect of any changes, add another filter. Select the Month/Year (Event) attribute. Under Select floating range, s et the floating date range to be from one month ago to the current month.
- Use the icons in the top right to select the Bubble chart type.
- Click the Show Configuration link in the top right. Click and drag the metrics and attributes so that # Tickets is on the Horizontal (X) axis, Avg Time spent per ticket is on the Vertical (Y) axis, and Total time spent is assigned to the Size.
- Click Apply.
- Your finished report should look like the one below. You can use the Show Configuration menu to change the colors and add labels if desired.
25 Comments
Why can't I report on time spent by ticket tag? We use tags to categorize our tickets and after going through all of the recipes to build the metrics I was very disappointed to discover that time by tag would yield "nonsensical results." Why is this? The way in which I'm using tags should be no different from how you're using Issue Type in the example from this article.
Colin Piper and Jacob Bockelmann. I'm having the same issue about not being able to select 'ticket tags' as the attribute. It's greyed out in good data, but I can shift-select it when building this report. However, it warns you and then errors out saying that the results will be nonsensical.
This is really unfortunate, because tags are exactly what we use to classify tickets and this data would be very beneficial to see.
The only issue I can see here is that tags is a list of strings and perhaps there is no operator to handle the fact that there are multiple tags in a ticket.
Hi Adam,
When you access the filter, you'd want to choose Select from a List of Values (including date ranges). Once in the filter view, click on Select Attribute and do a search for Month/Year (Event)
If you have other attributes in use within your report, you'll see those just listed, but you can filter by unused attributes through search. Just make sure to choose Month/Year (Event) and not the Month (Event) option as that one will aggregate differently (e.g November would show ALL Novembers rolled up)
I'm struggling to find Month/Year (event) in the filter for step 6
To ensure that your data stays accurate and you can see the effect of any changes, add another filter. Select the Month/Year (Event) attribute. Under Select floating range, s et the floating date range to be from one month ago to the current month.
@Jacob,
That is really bizarre that a save was required for you to have it show up. My screenshot was taken from a brand new report where I hadn't actually done anything except set the filter (I hadn't even saved). Thanks for jumping in with a second experience!
Hi Kris,
I see you have a ticket open with us already. An advocate will be in touch to take a look at your specific report.
@Everyone
Tags are problematic in Insights. We have a very recently updated article(4 days ago) on the topic that covers the details better than I ever could.
Insights tag reporting: Reporting on tickets with one or more tags (Professional and Enterprise)
If you haven't looked at that article recently I'd take a peek.
This is what you need to do in a nutshell:
A nice alternative to raw tags is using ticket fields. Ticket fields are much easier to work with in Insights. If you have a set of categories or related tags that can be combined into a custom dropdown reporting on it will be a breeze. Dropdown fields work by applying and removing tags so implementing one shouldn't require major changes to your workflow.
If you're struggling to get the results you need feel free to open a ticket with our support team and we'll take a look at your specific situation.
Cheers!
Month/Year (Event)
I'm not seeing this in "Select an attribute to filter"
Is Month/Year (Ticket Last Updated) equivalent?.
Folks, can you please update this recipe? At current, "Total Time Spent" no longer exists as a metric.
This report is great for us. There is one thing that would make it better and I'm not sure if it's possible. Is there a way to drill into a bubble to manually go through some of these tickets? For example, this report shows me that we spend a ton of time transferring accounts for our members. As a result we're going to build a self service migration tool. However, in the meantime, I'd like to go through these tickets to see how we're answering them and see if there is a way we can be more efficient. If I could click on a bubble and it would take me to a list of the tickets that comprise the bubble that would be great!
Hello
I was able to build the metrics and the reports but my times are coming back blank. I'm not quite sure what I am doing wrong here, but its probably something silly. The timer has been installed for a while now.
Thanks for calling that out, Thomas - we've pinged the documentation team.
Nice! I'm glad that did the trick. Cheers!
Hi!
I want to get the total time spent per update on all ticket forms that we have. Is it possible? How?
Hi Jonathon!
Multi select fields are not imported and don't count toward the field limit. To report on multi-select fields in Insights, you will need to use tags. See Insights recipe: Reporting on multi-select fields using ticket tags.
Jacob, can you help by identifying where your quote, "nonsensical results", comes from please? I did a search and could not find the article you may have read this in.
I ask this as I have many reports that use a tag as a filter and my results are perfectly fine so i wanted to get the context to this.
It is true that if you only want to track time after a tag was added that I can see that being troublesome but I am now guessing as to the issue.
@Adam, Month/Year (Event) was not showing up for me until I had first created the report. I'm unsure if that is a bug or by design, but saving/creating the report allowed me to find the filter attribute like Daniel shows above.
Hey Thomas!
The Time Tracking recipe series is intended to be completed in sequential order. The Total Time Spent metric is the very first metric you will need to create in the first article in this series, Time Tracking recipe: The metrics you need to be measuring.
Hey Brian,
Thanks! That article was great and allowed me to do a few additional things that I couldn't before. Namely allow me to filter based on one or more tags that are well defined.
However, the fundamental issue I'm having is that gooddata will not allow me to use '# Tickets' && 'ticket tags' with any of the 'agent time tracker' metrics I created.
I need to create a bubble graph that shows the `# Tickets` grouped by each of the TOP 30 tags used vs. avg time spent solving each group of tickets. This would change on a daily basis. This is the crux of it. It's the natural extension of the https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203664226-Time-Tracking-recipe-The-most-costly-support-issues-for-your-organization article, but using tag data already there vs. a custom field.
When you include `# Tickets` and `Ticket Tags` which has the data link to the tag model, it excludes you from selecting any time tracking attributes and vice versa.
Right now, what I could do with the knowledge I have, is specify 30 static tags with a whole lot of tag based numerical filters and get something, but it's usefulness and amount of maintenance would make it not worth it.
@Nicholas - Judging from your screenshot it looks like you used the "Ticket Numeric Change" attribute instead of "Numeric Field".
You'll want to replace the attribute I marked in the screenshot with "Numeric Field" from the Attributes menu. You'll need to change the attribute value as well. Be sure to select Attribute Values>Numeric Field>Total time spent (sec) when you add the value.
If that doesn't do the trick reply here and I'll spin up a ticket for you.
Cheers!
Brian Manning,
Thanks! If you do, it'll be some good magic to amend this article with! Looking forward to your results.
Hi there!
I'm just having some issues building the report. I've added my custom ticket field and the 2 custom metrics (as below), but am unable to locate the issue type in "how". Any suggestions?
I knew it was something simple. Thanks for your help! Works great!
Kris,
Let me take a look and see what I can do. I can't promise this is going to be possible using ranked tag metrics, but I'd like to see what I can do. I'll follow up when I have some news.
@Eric, You should be able to add a Ticket ID drill-in report to this type of report! On the dashboard where it is placed, go ahead and click "edit" (under the gear icon), and then select the report you want to add drilling to, and click on the gear icon next to the report. Under the "Drilling" tab, you will add drilling based on ticket ID:
This won't give you a table-formatted list, exactly, but will give you the ability to click on a data point and see the points that make it up, and click through to the tickets. Hopefully this helps!
Hi Amanda,
That is strange,
Could you try to make sure that the # Tickets metric is the only one selected in the WHAT tab and then search for the Month/Year (Event) attribute filter after that?
If that works try to add the other metrics afterwards (Total time spent (min) and Avg time spent per ticket (min)).
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