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:
- The time-tracking metrics you need to be measuring
- Leaderboards, time logs, top customers
- A look inside your agents’ day-to-day productivity (this article)
- The most-costly support issues for your organization
This third article in the series walks you through building a report to give you a very close view of the productivity of each of your agents. You can see how each of your agents stacks up to each other while comparing different aspects of your agent productivity.
For general information on setting up the Time Tracking app, see Setting up Time Tracking .
How much time are my agents spending on tickets and how do they compare?
Skill Level: Advanced
Time Required: 30 minutes
Ingredient list
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2 custom metrics to track Total time spent and Average time per update ( 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 > Create Report.
- Open the What menu and select Total time spent (min) , and Avg time spent per update (min) .
- Open the How menu and select Updater.
- Click Filter > Select from a list of values and add a new filter that says Date (event) Is. Under Select floating range , select the Range option and choose 6 days ago to today.
- Click Apply.
- Add another filter by clicking Add Filter. Under "What do you want to rank?," select a Ranking filter and set the filter for the Top 10 Updater by Total time spent (min). Updater is the attribute.
- Click Apply.
- Use the icons in the top right to select the Bar Chart type.
- Click the Show Configuration link in the top right. Click and drag the metrics and attributes so that Metric Values is on the Horizontal (X) axis, Updater is on the Vertical (Y) axis, and Metric names is assigned to the Series.
- Next, click on the arrow next to Metric Values in the Horizontal (X) Axis and change the drop down for Avg time spent per update (min) from Primary to Secondary and click Apply.
- Finally, move down to Advanced Configuration and click the + sign next to Axis X. Next, click the + sign next to Avg time spent per update (min) and change the Chart type from Bar to Area chart.
- Click Apply to create the report.
- In the report, you can use the Show Configuration menu to change the colors and add labels if desired.
21 Comments
Thank you for this report, it's really useful!
I was wondering if it's possible to filter the agents by group, as to have a report for tier 2 agents, for instance?
I am getting stuck on "Click the Show Configuration link in the top right. Click and drag the metrics and attributes so that Metric Values is on the Horizontal (X) axis, Updater is on the Vertical (Y) axis, and Metric names is assigned to the Series." Not sure where I would even see any of the Horizontal and Vertical items. In addition not sure where to click and drag to.
Hi Wilson!
The first thing you need to do is actually view your report - you won't find what you're looking for on a dashboard. On your dashboard, hover your mouse over the report you want to edit and you'll see a little down arrow button appear next to the title of the report. Click that button, then click View this report. That'll take you into the report itself.
Once you're there, you'll see a link: Show configuration. Click on that, and a drawer will slide out on the right side of your screen that will allow you to view the same settings you see in the screenshots above. The green and purple bubbles you see there can be dragged and dropped into different places depending on where in your report you want that information to display.
I hope that clears things up for you!
Hi Brandon, Thanks for this article - its been really helpful in getting me going!
We provide IT support for our clients, and some tickets can take over a month to solve. I would like to provide a monthly report to clients with a list of tickets and how much time was spent on them for that month. So say for example I'm working on a ticket titled "Server Migration" with a total time (so far) of 2 hours, 1 hour in January and 1 hour in February - is there a way for a report to generate the same ticket subject twice but with different values (of the total time spent) next to each one? Thanks in advance
Hey Leo!
I would recommend reviewing Time Tracking Recipe: Creating a billing report as it will guide you through creating this type of report using the Time Tracking Metrics from this series of articles.
We recommend reporting on the Solved date in the provided guide, however you could achieve a running total if you were to instead slice your report using one of the Event Date Dimensions.
Thank you!
Could you re post the example picture of the report so I can see if I'm close?
Thanks!
Hey Matt! Which report are you looking for?
Can you please post an example of what the report is supposed to look like? At the end of the article it says "Your finished report should look like the one below," but nothing is displayed.
Thanks!
So this is what my graph looks like. Not sure if it's right, it was only showing Agents initially.. But now it's showing end users too... not sure why that's hapening
**and as just a disclaimer**, we are only in the testing phase of the time stuff. My agents don't yet have the ability to adjust times on tickets if they've walked away from the ticket and it's been ticking away. So please look past the ultra high ticket times. I'm not worried about that just yet.
Hey Cameron and Matt - I've sent a ticket to our documentation team to get the original article updated with the image of the graph you're looking for. Stay tuned.
Hi,
I added these custom metrics to zendesk (from the article https://support.zendesk.com/entries/78238928-Time-Tracking-Recipes-Three-essential-metrics) and followed the report instructions in this page and some of my agents are getting negative numbers. How is this possible? Have you seen it before?
@Nicole Relyea, almost 3 months and no screenshot of what the final report should look like?
Also I think that step 7 is missing something, as it reads "What do you want to rank? (Example: CUSTOMER, or combination of FNAME, LNAME)", but when I go to that screen, I also see (2) What do you want to rank? (Example: CUSTOMER, or combination of FNAME, LNAME). Your instructions do not advise what attribute should be selected, or whether this should be left as is.
Hey Ashish -
I'll check in with the documentation team and see what the holdup is. I know there have been some changes to some things in Insights recently, and that may be the cause of some of the confusion.
Okay, no word on the screenshot. However I do have this info for you:
Under "What do you want to rank?" You'll want to select a Ranking Filter and set the filter for the Top 10 Updater by Total time spent (min). Updater is the attribute.
Hello Robin,
I think the negative numbers in time spent per update may be the result of some unexpected behavior we noticed recently. I would like to pull this request into a ticket so we can investigate further!
Hi !
On my side, I am not able to filter per agents.
Only per admin and end-user are available.
Which makes it useless... As I'm supposed to monitor agents, not end-users.
Can you please advise?
Thanks in advance
Hi Edouard,
This kind of filter would not be necessary for the report described above. Only agents can make updates to the time tracking app so there is no need to filter by role.
When you use the Updater attribute all the users displayed in the report would be agents.
That said, i'll create a ticket for you in case you'd like me to take a look at your report set up. You'll receive an email from me here shortly!
Hey Stephen.
Thanks a lot for your answer.
I found the culprit of the issue, I had the role restrictions enabled.
I added to Agents and it worked then. (Although I could have disable the function)
Cheers
Edouard
Hey Edouard, thanks for posting an update here! Hopefully it helps other users who may have experienced the same thing.
Thank you Brandon.
You just made my day!
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