This interactive “Full circle” session is all about connecting the dots between the Insights reporting in your Zendesk Support account and the steps you can take to improve your ticket lifecycle.

We think Suhail Doshi, CEO of Mixpanel, was right about the risk of businesses neglecting data when he said: “Most of the world will make decisions by either guessing or using their gut. They will be either lucky or wrong.”

Instead of leaving your team’s key decisions up to chance, we hope to help you understand the data tracked in your Zendesk account while also outlining a few simple steps you can take towards improving those metrics.

Answering your questions in the comments below are members of our Customer Success Team. You'll find them running online workshops designed to help our clients get more value out of their Zendesk accounts regardless of their use-case or industry.

You’ll see the webinar about this same topic of reporting with Insights here.

Part 1: Take a tour of Insights reporting

Before we get started, it’s important to note that Insights reporting is available with the Zendesk Support Professional and Enterprise Plans. If you’re on the Essential or Team Plan and are interested in upgrading, reach out your Account Executive or to support@zendesk.com.

Once you’re ready to enable Insights, just navigate to Reporting → Insights and click “Get Started”. That’ll start the quick process of building out the 200+ pre-built Insights reports with your historical Zendesk Support ticket data. So if you’ve been a Zendesk customer for a few years and are just now activating Insights, have no fear - your data is here!

Come back after lunch and take some time to just scroll through the pre-built dashboards. These were designed based on client feedback and best practices in customer service analytics. A short tour will help you avoid the pitfall of building out a custom report before realizing that it already exists ;)

Part 2: Review your ticket lifecycle in terms of data

Now that you’re familiar with what’s available out of the box, let’s zero in on just a few of the metrics most commonly reported upon by our clients.

To keep it simple, we’ll walk through them as they would appear in a typical ticket lifecycle:

• Peak times: High volume of new tickets
• First reply time: Average amount of time until an agent initially replies to the end-user
• One-touch tickets: Percentage of tickets that were solved in one reply
• Public comments: Average number of public comments between your agents and end-users
• Reassignments: Average number of times a ticket changes from one group to another
• Reopens: Percentage of tickets that were reopened after being solved
• Full resolution time: Average amount of time until a ticket is set to the solved status for the last time
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT): Percentage of tickets with a good satisfaction rating from the end-user
• Backlog: Number of tickets that are not in the solved or closed status (in other words - those in the new, open, pending, or on-hold status)

You can find a full listing of metrics available with Insights in our Help Center.

Part 3: Turning data points into action items

After analyzing how your team stacks up with those key performance indicators (KPIs), separate those that warrant investigation and outline a plan for how you’ll improve your team’s performance.

To help you get started, we’ve put together a simple “next step” for the nine metrics already highlighted:

• Clear peak times: Forecast staffing needs across your different channels to ensure your agent schedule reflects the busiest times and days throughout the week.
• High first reply time: Build out a library of macros to more efficiently reply to customers.
• High percentage of one-touch tickets: Prevent these tickets entirely by adding customer-facing content about these topics to your Help Center. (Take it one step further by using Answer Bot to automatically respond to simple requests by promoting the self-service content in your knowledge base.)
• Many public comments: Reduce the back-and-forth between agents and end-users by gathering more information from your customers up front on your ticket forms. That’ll empower your agents with all the information they need right from the start.
• Many reassignments: Improve your ticket routing with triggers and automations so customers get to the right agent right away.
• High percentage of reopens: This speaks to a potential disconnect between agent and end-user where your team thinks an issue is resolved but customers disagree. Because of this, consider a deep dive discussion with your agents about the topics that are frequently reopened to identify each ingredient necessary before solving these issues out.
• High full resolution time: Install apps and integrations (700+ in our marketplace!) to increase agent efficiency throughout the entire ticket lifecycle.
• Low CSAT rating: This requires more research into the cause of the declining CSAT score. Is poor performance in one of the previously mentioned metrics actually the root of this problem? Is there a trending issue with part of your company’s product that’s causing frustration? If you need to collaborate with another team on a solution, bring your data with you to prove the real impact of the problem.
• Growing backlog: This one also requires additional analysis. A growing backlog means you’re receiving more tickets than you can manage which will ultimately impact your other metrics. Options for better managing your backlog include deflecting more tickets through self-service, creating business rules that manage more of the workflow on your behalf, and possibly even increasing the size of your team. Either way, you’ll need data to see how your different attempts are moving the needle over time.

Of course, for many of these KPIs you’ll want to slice and dice the data based on your own custom ticket fields, groups, business hours, SLAs, and more to pinpoint the real cause of the problem behind the statistic.

Part 4: Making it your own

To this point, we’ve focused on just a fraction of what’s possible with Insights out of the box, but this platform has much more to offer.

By clicking the gear icon, you’re able to create custom reports that pull in your team’s own unique fields and tags. To get started on the right foot, you have the option of using a pre-built template and adjusting it from there. Otherwise, you can build a report completely from scratch. Up to you!

Note: Ready to start building out custom reports? Check out 50+ recipes in our Help Center with step-by-step instructions for building powerful reports. For example, this report can help you identify the most costly support issues for your organization.

Once you’ve got the reports looking the way you want, make life easier by leveraging the feature behind the clock icon in the upper-right corner. With this handy little tool, you can schedule automated emails to send reports or dashboards out to the distribution list of your choosing. This means all stakeholders from around your company have access to the most up to date information on time while removing a “to do” from your list.

If you’d like some additional guidance on these topics, we suggest registering for the introductory and/or advanced Zendesk Insights courses led by our Training Team (live and on-demand versions available). Our Training Team is proud to receive a 95% CSAT rating from attendees of their courses.

Bringing it “Full circle”

We hope you walk away from this discussion with a better understanding of how ongoing analysis of your Insights reporting can streamline day-to-day operations for your agents and create a more seamless journey for your customers.

The basic relationships we highlighted between “KPI and next step” are just the beginning. With custom reporting and the combination of multiple Zendesk products, there are countless ways to analyze and improve your support experience from start to finish.