First Response Time Inaccuracies

Answered

Posted Nov 27, 2019

We were noticing that when we get statistics from the main Zendesk Reporting dashboard that we always had a percentage of tickets that were showing as being responded to in over 24 hours however responding to all customer service communications in under 24 hours is part of our proposition and this was impossible.

I've now learned that if an agent creates a ticket, the customer responds and then we reply to them, the response time is based on the difference in time between the ticket creation and our response to the customer rather than the time between the customer's reply and our response to them. This statistic is therefore not accurate and I think it would be more useful if it reflected our response time to the customer.

2 comments

Date

Victor Ivaniv

Dec 28, 2019

Hi Catriona,

You should be able to filter out agent-created tickets from First Response Time by Ticket Submitter attribute. This, however, is not really a convenient way as Ticket Submitter's values are actual user accounts and you'll have to checkmark every single agent from the whole list of user accounts as they are not grouped by roles for this attribute. Additionally, this will mean that agent-created tickets are not taken into account, which is not OK (still, that's the way we're currently doing it).

The other way around is creating specific metrics that would return FRT for end user-created tickets and agent-created tickets separately and combine these metrics into single metric that calculates average for both, where FRT for agent-created tickets is the time between first customer response and the next agent reply. Unfortunately, I'm not good enough yet to create such metrics (and not sure if such metrics are possible at this point) and show you an example. Lets hope a wandering Explore or GoodData adept will come over this article to give us a hand.

UPD: in case you are using Explore - it does actually have Submitter Role filter

-1

Ryan Lainchbury

Feb 04, 2021

Our team deals with this issue as well.

About 50% of our ticket volume is Agent created, 30% of which customers respond to. We want to include our response time to these customers, but it often results in a skewed First Response Time because of the delay that our customers take.

Here is a solution that we made!

The agent creates a ticket
The agent applies a tag of 'outbound' and submits it as any status.
I've created a trigger that looks for the 'outbound' tag and automatically sets the ticket to closed (this prevent the First Response Time for this ticket)
The trigger notifies the requester (i.e. end-user) - let's say three days pass.
The customer replies, creating a follow-up ticket.
When/if the requester (i.e. end-user) responds, a follow-up ticket is created with the 'outbound' tag on it from the previous ticket.
A trigger then removes the 'outbound' tag from the follow-up ticket and adds a 'follow-up' tag (so we can report on the number of follow-ups we get vs outbounds.)
The Agent responds and an accurate First Response Time is recorded!

Here are my screenshots of the triggers.