How much does it cost your support team to tackle questions about various issue types or how much time do you spend on various customers?
In this report, you'll use data collected by the Zendesk Time Tracking app to create a cost of service metric you can use in your reports.
This article contains the following topics:
What you'll need
Skill level: Medium
Time required: 20 minutes
- Zendesk Explore Professional or Enterprise
- Editor or Admin permissions (see Giving agents access to Explore)
- Ticket data in Zendesk Support
- The Zendesk Time Tracking app must be installed, and must have collected data
Note: The time tracking app stores data in custom numeric fields that are synchronized with Explore. If you have installed the Time Tracking app recently, the data required to build necessary calculated metrics might not yet be synced with Explore. This sync occurs once an hour.
Creating the cost of service metric
The time tracking app tracks how long agents spend working on various tickets. The app reports this in seconds, but for this recipe, you’ll convert the value into hours by creating a new calculated metric.
- In Explore, click the reports (
) icon.
- In the Reports library, click New report.
- On the Select a dataset page, click Support > Support - Tickets dataset. This dataset is where the historic custom field data from the Time Tracking app is stored.
- In the report builder, open the calculations menu (
), then click Standard calculated metric.
- Name the new metric Cost of service metric.
- In the formula window, enter the following formula:
VALUE(Total time spent (sec))/3600*(your hourly rate)
Tip: If you're working in a language other than English, read this article to help you enter Explore formulas in your language. - For example, if your hourly rate is $15.99, enter
VALUE(Total time spent (sec))/3600*15.99
- When you are finished, click Save.
Using the cost of service metric
Now you've created the metric, you can use it in any of your reports that use the Support: Tickets dataset.
To use the cost of service metric in a report
- In Explore, open a new report using the Support: Tickets dataset.
- In the Metrics panel, click Add.
- From the list of metrics, choose Calculated metrics > Cost of service metric, then click Apply. Explore displays the total cost of service for all tracked time spent on tickets.
Now, you can add attributes to the Columns or Rows panel to slice this cost data to your needs. For example, add the Ticket ID attribute to see the cost for each ticket, or the Assignee name attribute to see the cost for each assignee.
Next steps
You can change the display format of this metric to dollar amounts from the display format page of the chart configuration menu ( ) . By slicing this metric by various attributes, you can produce detailed cost estimates for different parts of your organization.
For more help, see Creating reports.
10 Comments
Hi, if i dont have the time tracker app and still use this recipe what exactly will the report show?
Hi Sarah,
This recipe will only work if you're using the Time Tracking App as the formulas pull data from the custom fields that are populated by the app.
Thanks Taylor, i have created the query as per above without knowing the time tracking app is required. It still gives me output, are you able to advise what data I am looking at?
Hi @...,
I'm going to open a ticket on your behalf so we can take a closer look at the report you've set up.
Best,
In the Metrics - should I use Average? AVG?
I don't think SUM is correct. Using this formula and using SUM in Metrics gives 3 digit number results per agent.
This formula computes the cost per ticket right? based on their hourly cost.
Do we use AVG?
I have several hourly rates to factor in, based on multiple regional hubs that carry differing agent populations, therefore differing weightings. Can this be accommodated somehow?
I think you might be able to adapt this for your needs if you keep track of the applicable regional hub in a custom ticket field. If you do, then you should be able to use an IF THEN ELSE or a CASE statement in your standard metric formula (e.g., if the ticket custom field is Region X, then calculated the formula using that region's weighting, or if the ticket is attributed to Region Y, then use a different formula). For more information, see Using the IF THEN ELSE function and Adding multiple conditional expressions with SWITCH.
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