7 Best Practices for Help Desk Reporting

There’s a ton of data that is created with every support request serviced in your help desk. Every ticket comes with its set of vital time-based metrics, ticket tags, and customer ratings. When you multiply that by the average number of tickets your business receives on a daily basis, what you have is a treasure trove of insights hidden within your help desk system. Help desk reporting enables you to visualize and make sense of all this underlying data as meaningful insights that you can use to improve your support team’s performance.

Below, we’ll cover all that you need to know about help desk reports and share proven best practices on help desk reporting. You can use the following index to jump to the section you’d like to read first.

• What is help desk reporting?
• 5 Useful help desk reports
• How to create a help desk report?
• 7 Help desk reporting best practices

What is help desk reporting?

Help desk reporting is the activity of measuring customer support performance by condensing and translating help desk data into easily digestible information using tables, charts, and graphs. Help desk reports summarize key support metrics as actionable insights that can inform and optimize future support strategy. 

Support teams can benefit immensely from drilling deeper into both past and current ticket data and metrics with in-depth help desk reports.

Helpdesk reporting allows you to,

– Monitor support ticket volume and adjust staffing accordingly.

– Review agent performance to reward, train, or upskill customer service representatives.

– Observe trends in customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores after support interactions.

– Share updates with other teams, executives, or key stakeholders looking for an overview of the support team’s performance.

Depending on the goal and metrics you want to drill down into, most support teams regularly use a few common help desk reports. 

5 Useful help desk reports

1. Ticket volume trends report

The help desk volume trends report gives you an overview of the number of tickets created, resolved, unresolved, and reopened over a specific time period. The report allows you to quickly assess the status of ticket backlogs, resolution of high-priority issues, and identify peak times in ticket flow over a day, week, or month.

Key help desk metrics in the volume trends report include:

• Total received tickets
• Total resolved tickets
• Total unresolved tickets

You can do an additional data deep-dive by viewing the breakup of each ticket bucket by source channel, ticket priority, request type, or status (on hold, waiting for customer’s response). 

For instance, looking at the unresolved tickets split by priority can help you quickly identify if there’s a greater backlog of high priority tickets over a time period and move your team members to resolve them at the earliest.

2. Help desk performance reports

Help desk performance reports give you an overview of the important time and SLA metrics linked with the efficiency of your help desk ticketing system. You can view the performance metrics for the help desk as a whole or dive deeper into every metric as individual datasets, analyzing them with respect to other request properties such as channel, request type, priority, or number of responses.

Key metrics associated with help desk performance reports include,

• Average first response time
• Average response time
• Average resolution time
• First response SLA
• Resolution SLA
• First contact resolution

3. Agent performance reports

As a customer support manager, you can get a summary of your agent’s efforts and efficiency using an agent performance report. In Freshdesk, you can use agent performance reports to gain insights into an agent’s efficiency by tracking critical KPIs and SLA metrics such as average response and resolution times and also the amount of time spent on tickets.

You can also view an agent’s ticket activities, including the number of tickets reassigned or reopened, the number of responses per ticket, and the number of private/public notes added. 

These insights help you identify the types of requests each agent is skilled at handling and where additional training support is needed.

4. Customer satisfaction (CSAT) feedback reports

CSAT scores help you measure how satisfied customers are after every support interaction. Apart from accessing the overall customer happiness score for your help desk, you can use CSAT survey reports to analyze customer satisfaction against individual agents or agent groups and focus on improving agent efficiency.

5. Top customers’ request analysis reports

If you’re looking to understand which customer accounts had the most support interactions and the type of requests they’ve raised, then the customer analysis report is what you should be referring to. You can view the number of requests and related time or SLA metrics with respect to each company and take account-specific actions.

For instance, if you notice a high number of unresolved tickets for a specific company, you can allocate more team members to drive resolutions for that particular customer.

 

Apart from these common reports that are mostly available as prebuilt templates or curated reports, modern help desk software like Freshdesk allows you to build your own reports with custom metrics and filters.

How to create a help desk report?

Here are four easy steps to build your help desk report on Freshdesk. 

Step #1: Drag and drop the basic entities of your report

Click on ‘New report’ on your help desk reporting interface and choose the basic entities—also referred to as ‘widgets’ in Freshdesk—that are available with the preset metrics in your help desk. You can either choose an existing widget or build one yourself with the metrics you want to study.

Step #2: Select the type of data visualization

Choose how you want the data to appear on the report by picking the data visualization options that best interpret your data. You can opt to represent the data as bar charts, pie charts, linear trends, or as tabular data.

Step #3: Apply report filters to drill deeper into your help desk data

Your reports are as powerful as the filter you apply to pivot and view data in multiple dimensions. You can add filters to view or compare performance over date ranges, agent groups, individual reps, or even across multiple products or services your company offers.

Step #4: Schedule and share your report as necessary

Unless you’re doing an experimental, once-in-a-while deep dive into data for specific insights, you might want to schedule all your regular reports for consistent help desk monitoring. There may be certain reports—like the ticket backlog or resolution time reports—that you may want to view recurrently on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. 

Set the frequency of your report schedules and share them with team members who might benefit from these reports.

Here’s a video giving you a quick overview of building help desk reports on Freshdesk.

7 Help desk reporting best practices

A good report highlights data trends and communicates important information that keeps the wheels of your customer service function running smoothly.

A less-than-perfect report, on the other hand, conceals important ideas and overwhelms the readers with convoluted information. To help you avoid a desk overflowing with reports that you can’t use, here are seven best practices you can adopt for optimizing your helpdesk reports.

1. Determine the main objective of your report

Every help desk report pivots on a different dataset and interprets the underlying data in various ways. Pulling reports for every metric and applying random filters will lead to more chaos than obtaining accurate information.

To avoid this scenario, be sure of your report’s goals and know what questions you want to be answered with a specific help desk report. 

Let’s say you want to look at the overall SLA performance of agents across different time zones. You can pull up the agent performance report and add a filter to group by time zones rather than individual agents.

Being specific about your goal will help you narrow down the right dataset and filters to be used for your help desk report.

Related resource: Your guide to making informed decisions for different use cases using Freshdesk Analytics

2. Focus on the metrics relevant to your individual report goals

This is another potential pitfall with having access to a wealth of rich data. Not all of the metrics and data you have will be relevant to your business at a given time, and trying to manage it all detracts from achieving your department’s goals.

For instance, is one of your goals to cut down on ticket resolution time for high priority tickets? If so, looking at the same data for low or medium priority tickets isn’t relevant to that goal. Applying the right filters within your report helps build more detailed reports by narrowing down the dataset most relevant to your helpdesk reporting use case.

As a rule of thumb, if you can’t immediately identify how a performance indicator can be translated into action, it’s not significant to your current goals. 

3. Exclude the outliers in your reports

Datasets, especially larger datasets, are prone to outliers. Outliers are data points that far exceed the normal distribution of the set, either as extremely high or low values. 

In the below example, both orange dots—employee #2 and employee #19—are outliers.

Image source: Criteria Corp

Outliers that appear consistently over a long period of time can indicate a problem, but if they’re new events, you should investigate the circumstances behind them before forming a plan of action to fix things.

Events that are unlikely to repeat themselves, such as multiple managers being off-site, are outliers. Isolate tickets that arise from outlier events from your reports as points of concern, but hold off on acting on them until you understand the situation behind them.

4. Share your reports to encourage more transparency

Encourage your agents to take ownership of the customer experience by giving them everything they need to thrive, including emotional support, healthy work-life balance, and open communication about the goals of the department and team.

This means, among other things, not hoarding your reports from your agents. Give them the information they need to be actionable, and perhaps even encourage a little healthy competition factor by showing them the benchmarks for your top agents.

Consider incorporating a little gamification into the process. Not only does gamification break up the monotony of the day, but it may also be the key to successfully transforming operations practices.

With Freshdesk Analytics, you can set permissions and control access while sharing help desk reports with agents and other cross-functional collaborators. 

5. Stick to key takeaways for top-level executives

While your agents should have a transparent culture of communication, your executive, cross-departmental colleagues don’t need the nitty-gritty details. When you’re going over reports with other executives, focus on what’s imperative to the business at large.

After all, what one metric means for you is vastly different from what it means to other departments. Just like your own reports shouldn’t be overwhelming with unimportant metrics, the reports you compile for your top-level executives should be brief and to the point.

Data that drives a point home does its job well: data that gets everyone lost in the weeds, on the other hand, is best left off. A helpdesk suite with robust reporting abilities distills data into its simplest form using the art of good data visualization.

6. Set a manageable reporting schedule

Unless your business makes use of your helpdesk daily reports, it’s not necessary to pull them every day. In fact, viewing your reports daily may actually impede your progress rather than optimize it.

Try to configure your regular reports on a schedule that’s both actionable and manageable. Generating reports once a week is probably a good start. With Freshdesk, you can schedule reports on a recurring basis and email them to yourself or any of your team members at periodic intervals. You get real-time results and the ability to pivot on them quickly, but you don’t spend your day trying to tease out trends that may not be relevant in the long run.

7. Don’t skip the qualitative data

Helpdesk reporting spits numbers and numbers are impactful—they’re reliable, quantitative, and allow you to highlight statistically significant trends. But they’re also incomplete without context and ‘softer’ data points.

Customer experience isn’t limited to the time it takes to resolve a ticket or the average first response time: it’s about the whole interaction with your brand. You need to understand how customers feel as part of their customer journey.

After all, what are customers more likely to remember: that their ticket was resolved in 7.2 hours or that the agent who resolved their ticket was friendly, patient, and went above and beyond?

Both are important metrics, even if only one can be quantified.

Ready to uncover game-changing insights with help desk reporting?

Though support data may sound complex and intimidating for a customer service professional, help desk reporting—when done the right way— simplifies the process of grasping useful information and helps you make informed decisions that impact your company’s customer service experience.

Powerful and advanced help desk software like Freshdesk has both pre-built help desk report templates and the ability to craft your own customized reports with relevant ticket properties, which further eases your reporting experience. You can also share, schedule, and export reports as PDFs or CSVs to get the most out of your help desk analytics.

With these intuitive features, you can transform your help desk from a run-of-the-mill operation to a data-crunching analytical powerhouse. 

Create insightful help desk reports

Updated on Nov 23, 2022.

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