Tickets

A Customer Issue, in addition to documenting the request, will generally capture a lot of additional detail, such as steps to reproduce, system or device information, urgency, customer type, location etc...

As Customer Issues come in, they are in an open state, and depending on the organization, they flow through a number of state changes, such as active, pending, and stale, before they are finally closed.

Issue Tracking Systems (ITS) are most commonly used in a support, help desk, or customer success function, but are also used extensively with software development and manufacturing organizations. An ITS can help automate much of the documentation and status history.

Having an idea of how many tickets are in your support queue, new ones being opened, and existing ones closed, can help you determine reasons for a high and low volume. If you have a low number of open tickets, this could indicate your support team has very efficient response times or that you don't have many issues/inquiries at that moment.

A high number of open incidents could indicate your team is struggling to keep up with the volume of inquiries. This could be a lack of efficiency or perhaps necessitate hiring more support staff to keep up.

Using this metric, especially with ratios such as Tickets Per Agent, or Tickets Per Customer will help assess the health of your team.