Help Desk Ticket Analysis: 5 Key Focus Areas For Reports

Welcome to the 5 key areas to focus on for your help desk ticket analysis reports.

You know you have a lot of data to analyze that may help you lighten or streamline the load your team bears. You also know you have a lot on your plate.  

So are there specific areas you should focus on during your help desk ticket analysis reports to help you get to your destination more quickly? Read on.

What is a help desk ticket analysis report and why is it important? 

A help desk ticket analysis reveals trends happening with your submitted tickets. This report essentially offers a visualization telling the story of the different types of your submitted help desk tickets. By adhering to a consistent rhythm of reviewing and analyzing your tickets, you’ll be able to improve your support interactions and experiences.  

So what does this analysis report really do for you and why is it important? 

Seeing trends populating behind your hundreds of ticket submissions allows you to know what you need to do to alleviate your ticket volume.  

Not only that, you’ll also be able to diminish some of the redundant workload of your team members. Solving repetitive items that can be clarified with self-help documents will go a long way to clear up time to focus on bigger tasks at hand.  

All in all, this analysis report helps you connect the dots and allows you to see what’s actually happening in your help desk department. 

 

The 5 key areas to focus on for help desk ticket analysis 

What should you focus on and ensure is included in your help desk ticket analysis? Take the following five key data points and ensure you know what these typical help desk KPIs are saying and why they may be important for you.  

1. Help desk load: See the amount of ongoing tickets, how many are received on a certain basis and the time your team members are working to respond to tickets. This initial point will give you a good measure of what is happening overall with your help desk team. From there, the other points below will offer a more granular view of the items impacting your help desk load. 
2. Average resolution time: Know how long it’s taking your team to bring the submission to a resolution. The longer your team is taking to solve the average ticket, the less your team can handle. If your team has sufficient resources available to users, then it may be commonplace for your team to be dealing with longer resolution times. This means they are dealing with more intricate tickets, and not spending an inordinate amount of time on simple tasks. Dig into what the average issues are and if the resolution time matches the average ticket type.  
3. Average response time: Gauge how long it takes your team to initially respond to help desk tickets as they come in. If you notice that it’s taking any submission to be responded to longer than 24 hours, there’s an issue that needs to be addressed. Whether staffing or efficiency, it’s best to keep the threshold lower than this to upkeep your customer experience.  
4. Ticket volume: In order to find trends to know what your biggest pain points are, you’ll need to keep a steady eye to ticket volume and what the peaks are looking like. If you’re seeing significant spikes that are happening, it’s probably suggestive that you have something that requires immediate action. There may be something broken in the system, or you may need more external facing documentation for your users. If you’re seeing a steady pace for what appears to be notable increases in volume, it may be time to hire more staff.  
5. Ticket volume by channel: If your organization collects help desk tickets from channels other than a single submission pipeline, understand and visualize which channels populate the most volume. This can tell you two important things.  

If you have a particular channel that is producing more volume than others, it may need to be given more staff attention or may need more self-help options. If there’s one channel that seems to be lagging in volume more than the others, it could be indicative that you’re providing sufficient support or that the option of channel may or may not need to be advertised more. It’s up to you and your data to determine which category this falls into and where you should go from there.  

How to use these analysis reports to improve efficiency 

Now that you know what you should have included and focus on with your help desk ticket analysis, now what? Do you understand what to look for within those groups of data and what it might be telling you? Consider these points to interpret your reports and start improving your team’s efficiency. 

• Identifying ticket trends will probably be your top priority and answer you receive from your help desk ticket analysis reports. Take a look at all the five data points mentioned above and map out what it’s telling you. At the end of the day, the best solution ticket trends are pointing to may be that you need to bring on a couple new members onto your team. Maybe it’ll tell you that your team is doing an amazing job and deserves further recognition. Either way, you won’t know if you’re not looking and analyzing your help desk ticket analysis properly.  
• Identifying and creating self-help documentation should be your next action step from here. While this may take additional effort from your team, it will be an upfront investment that will end up saving your team plenty of time and effort almost immediately after. This could also allow for a great opportunity for you to collaborate with your marketing department to help put together insightful and effective documentation. 
• Automatic ticket assignment can be the next beast you tackle to help improve the flow of tickets and so everyone knows what they own. If you see that there are natural groupings of types of tickets coming in with team members that really shine with those, give them ownership. Look at what you’re getting in and the strengths of those on your team. From there, figuring out an automated ticket assignment system may come naturally to roll out. 

 

Your data is ready to tell you something – you just have to be willing and know how to listen. Keep these five help desk KPIs in mind when building your help desk ticket analysis to start enhancing your team’s efficiency.  

 

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Do you need a tool to help provide real-time data visualization and reporting for your analysis endeavors? Talk to our team for a free solutions consultation to see how VUE from Aceyus can help your reporting needs. 

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