Time Tracking recipe: The metrics you need to be measuring

If you're using the Time Tracking app, and have Insights (Plus and Enterprise), you can track the time your support team spent on every Zendesk ticket.

Tip: If you are using Zendesk Explore, you'll find help creating time tracking reports at Time Tracking app: metrics you need to be measuring.

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:

1. The time-tracking metrics you need to be measuring (this article)

2. Leaderboards, time logs, top customers

3. Advanced time-tracking report: A look inside your agents’ day-to-day productivity

4. Advanced time-tracking report: The most costly support issues for your organization

This first article in the series walks you through setting up three essential metrics in your Insights account. These metrics are the building blocks that you will use to create reports in our other recipes and an be used in any custom report you want to make later.

Note: If you recently installed the Time Tracking app, the custom fields required to build these metrics might not yet appear in Insights. The fields become available after your ticket data sync with Insights. This sync occurs once an hour for Enterprise and once a day for Professional.

For general information on setting up the Time Tracking app, see Setting up Time Tracking.

Metric 1: Total time spent

This metric will measure the total time spent on each of your tickets through the Time Tracking app. This metric is used as part of the other two metrics in this recipe, so be sure to follow the instructions carefully.

Skill Level: Basic

Time Required: 10 minutes

Note: Prior to September 21 2018, follow-up tickets inherited the total time spent from the previous ticket, then removed it on the agent's first update. This led to an accurate total time on the ticket, but the correction often appeared as an update with negative time spent. This should not be an issue for new tickets. However, for historic tickets, you might want to exclude follow-up tickets with the recipe Filtering for follow-up tickets.

Instructions

1. Click Reporting ( ) in the sidebar, then click the Insights tab. Click the GoodData link in the top right corner of the panel.
2. In Insights, in the top menu, click Manage > Metrics > Create Metric > Custom metric.
3. In the Name your metric field, enter Total time spent (min).
4. Click into the metric editor and enter SELECT SUM(IFNULL(
   
   
5. Add an element by going to the menu on the right side of the screen and clicking Facts , then select [Numeric Field] New value and click Add Selected to add the fact to your metric.
   
   
6. Back in the Metric editor, add ,0) - IFNULL(
7. Add another element to your metric by clicking Facts , then then select [Numeric Field] Old value and click Add Selected to add the fact to your metric. This fact should be right next to the last one you added.
   
8. Back in the metric editor, enter ,0)) / 60 WHERE
   
9. Add another element to your metric by clicking Attributes > Numeric Field. Once Numeric Field is selected, add it to your metric by clicking Add Selected.
10. Back in the metric editor, enter an equals sign (=).
11. Click Attribute Values. You will see a list of attributes again. After you select the attribute you're using for your metric, you can then select the attribute value as your final element.
12. Select the Numeric field attribute, then the Total time spent (sec) attribute value. Your attribute value will appear in orange.
13. Add the element by clicking Add Selected.
14. Your final Metric should appear as follows: SELECT SUM(IFNULL([Numeric Field] New value,0) - IFNULL([Numeric Field] Old value,0)) / 60 WHERE Numeric Field = Total time spent (sec)
    
    
15. Click Add at the bottom right.
16. On the next screen, under Metric Format , click on #,##0.00 and change it to #,##0.0 min
    

Metric 2: Avg time spent per ticket (min)

This metric will measure the average time spent on each individual ticket. This will use the metric we previously created in this recipe, so be sure not to skip around. We’ll use this metric later in some of our reports to get a birds eye view on how long tickets are taking your team to complete.

Skill Level: Basic

Time Required: 5 minutes

Instructions

1. Click the Reporting ( ) in the sidebar, then click the Insights tab. Click the GoodData link in the top right corner of the panel.

2. In Insights, in the top menu, click Manage > Create Metric > Custom metric .

3. In the Name your metric field, enter Avg time spent per ticket (min).
   

4. Click into the metric editor and enter SELECT AVG(SELECT.

5. Add an element by going to the menu on the right side of the screen and clicking Metrics > Total time spent (min) and click Add Selected to add the metric to your metric. Note that this is the metric we created earlier in the recipe.

6. Click in to the metric editor again and enter BY.

7. Add another element by going to the menu on the right side of the screen and clicking Attributes, then Tickets, then select Ticket Id and click + Add Selected to add the Attribute to your metric

8. Click in to the metric editor again and enter ).

9. Your final metric should read SELECT AVG(SELECT Total time spent (min) BY Ticket Id).

10. Click Add at the bottom right.

11. On the next screen, under Metric Format , click on #,##0.00 and change it to #,##0.0 min

Metric 3: Avg time spent per update (min)

This metric will measure the average time spent on each update of a ticket. This will use the first metric we created in this recipe, so be sure not to skip around. We’ll use this metric later in some of our reports to get an up close look at your agent activity to help you tighten up efficiency.

Skill Level: Basic

Time Required: 5 minutes

Instructions

1. Click the Reporting ( ) in the sidebar, then click the Insights tab. Click the GoodData link in the top right corner of the panel.

2. In Insights, in the top menu, click Manage > Create Metric > Custom metric .

3. In the Name your metric field, enter Avg time spent per update (min).

4. Click into the metric editor and enter SELECT AVG(SELECT.

5. Add an element by going to the menu on the right side of the screen and clicking Metrics > Total time spent (min) and click Add Selected to add the metric to your metric. Note that this is the metric we created in the first section of the recipe.

6. Click in to the metric editor again and enter BY.

7. Add another element by going to the menu on the right side of the screen and clicking Attributes, then Ticket Updates, then select Ticket Updates and click + Add Selected to add the Attribute to your metric

8. Click in to the metric editor again and enter ).

9. Your final metric should read SELECT AVG(SELECT Total time spent (min) BY Ticket Updates).

10. Click Add at the bottom right.

11. On the next screen, under Metric Format , click on #,##0.00 and change it to #,##0.0 min