My two favorite gauges when it comes to support are Opened and Closed counts for a given time period. In the top left corner of every service dashboard I have ever had, which is where we instinctively first look, is the Open and Closed ticket count. Here’s a screenshot from our service dashboard right now:
The number of Open and Closed tickets can give you a wealth of information in a split second. For the sake of this example, let’s assume the time period is “today” meaning we’re looking at tickets opened today and also tickets closed today.
Count - The actual number is a great indication of the overall volume of tickets for the day. You know the time of day it is and as you get used to seeing the number you will naturally begin to know if the ticket count is high or low for the day based on the trends. That will help you determine if there has been a spike of activity or not.
Comparison of the two Counts (i.e. Open vs Closed) - The dream of any service team is to close more tickets than are opened during a given time period, bringing the service backlog number down. So for this example, we would want to close more tickets than are open for a given day. However at any given time when you look at the two numbers and compare them that’s when you get a snapshot of whether the team keeping up.
Below are two examples of Open and Closed Tickets that I took from our own internal service dashboard yesterday, as you can see from the first image from 2:30pm, we were behind:
Then we had a quick huddle to figure out what was going on and how we were going to attack the problem. We got another team member assigned to help out for a few hours and here is how we closed out the day:
If your team is not keeping up with the tickets being opened every day and that pattern continues you may put yourself in a position where the backlog of tickets becomes too large and difficult to recover. That’s why it’s important to regularly monitor your Service Backlog which is simply the difference between your Open and Closed tickets. Below is a screenshot of how that looks:
Next time I’ll share some best practices we used to do at Compuquip and still do at BrightGauge to help with Service Backlog Management.
In the mean time, to learn how you can Improve Your Business with KPIs on Dashboards please download out latest white paper:
