Ticket Volume is a major indicator of the demand placed on your customer support team. But, to manage Ticket Volume trends effectively, you need to understand what this metric is, how it’s measured, and most importantly — how to reduce it. In this post, we’ll take a deep dive into Ticket Volume and explore the best strategies for keeping it under control.
What is Ticket Volume?
Ticket Volume (also referred to as Total Tickets or Conversation Volume) tracks all support inquiries that happen across channels. Think about all the phone calls, emails, chat sessions, and social media messages you receive.
These inquiries can be anything from a general question to a complex technical problem that requires a support agent’s attention. Over time, as customer demand for your business grows, the volume of tickets is likely to increase too. Are you ready?
How to calculate Ticket Volume?
The most common way to track Ticket Volume is to measure the total number of tickets over a period of time. If you use customer support software, this should be easy to do.
You can calculate Ticket Volume for each channel separately, or look at the total Conversation Volume across all channels. It all depends on the support streams you offer and the software you use.
Ticket Volume = Emails + Phone calls + Live chat sessions + Social media messages
You can also calculate the average Ticket Volume per agent, per hour, or per day. These metrics can help you identify support trends and patterns that inform better customer service strategies and staffing decisions. Which brings us to the next point…
Why measure Ticket Volume?
Ultimately, monitoring Ticket Volume contributes to better customer service, quicker response times, and a more satisfying experience for your customers. How come?
Prioritizing support tasks
Tracking Ticket Volume helps your customer support team prioritize their tasks. By organizing and sorting customer tickets based on how many there are, how urgent they are, and how complicated they are, teams can make sure they tackle the important stuff right away.
If there’s a ton of tickets in a specific category, it might mean there’s a problem that needs fixing or more help is needed. Armed with this information, teams can make smart choices about where to put their energy. No matter if it’s getting more resources, improving processes, or adding self-service options.
All of this leads to quicker responses and happier customers in the end.
Setting realistic goals for your customer service team
Keeping an eye on Conversation Volume helps you set realistic customer service goals. You can look at past data to see how many tickets your support team usually gets and use that as a benchmark. By setting goals based on Ticket Volume among other metrics, your team can focus on working efficiently and making customers happy.
Forecasting staffing needs
Analyzing Ticket Volume is important for figuring out how many team members are and what kind of training is needed. By looking at how many tickets come in and how they’re spread out, teams can see if they have enough people to handle everything.
If there are lots of tickets piling up and it takes a long time to respond, purrr-haps you need more reps or better training. If there are very few tickets, it could mean there are too many people on the support team and resources could be used more efficiently. It’s all about finding the right balance to work smoothly and save costs.
Tracking this metric is also useful for spotting patterns, trends, and busy times. Holidays, new product launches, or when a big marketing campaign is running — these all can be associated with a high Ticket Volume. Knowing the patterns can help you plan better and make sure you have enough people to cover busier periods.
Ticket Volume isn’t just a random number. By keeping an eye on how many tickets your team can handle, you can evaluate their performance, spot relevant patterns and trends, and improve the workload. Equipped with all this info, your team can provide amazing support, solve problems effectively, and build strong relationships with customers.
Are there any limitations when tracking Ticket Volume?
While measuring your Ticket Volume can be helpful, it’s important to know its limitations.
For starters, the total number of tickets doesn’t provide details about the complexity of issues or the time needed to resolve them. This means that relying solely on total Ticket Volume may not give an accurate picture of your support team’s workload — or customer satisfaction.
In fact, if your only focus is on reducing Ticket Volume, you might miss the bigger picture of offering support quality. Just because the number of tickets goes down doesn’t automatically mean customers are happier or that their problems are fully resolved.
Not all tickets are the same, and some issues may require more time and attention than others. Consider tracking other metrics, like CSAT, NPS, CES, or IQS. By looking beyond Ticket Volume, you’ll get a more accurate complete understanding of the team’s performance and overall customer satisfaction.
How to reduce Ticket Volume?
The key to reducing Ticket Volume is to address the root cause of customer inquiries. This can be accomplished through proactive communication, self-service options, and support automation:
1. Offer proactive support
To make things easier for customers and reduce the number of tickets, it’s a great idea to be one step ahead. In other words, anticipate the common issues they might face and provide helpful tips before they even have to ask.
Depending on the nature of your business, you can do this by sending friendly emails or in-app notifications. No matter the communication channel, regularly share newsletters and product updates. For example, regarding upcoming maintenance or changes that might affect customer experience.
Also, keep an eye on how customers behave to spot any patterns or possible problems they might encounter. Be proactive and offer assistance if you see a customer struggling with your products or services — you can provide resources, tutorials, or personalized help to help them overcome any difficulties. By reaching out first, your team can prevent a lot of unnecessary questions and show customers that the company truly cares about their satisfaction.
Pro tip: Regularly ask customers for their opinions by sending surveys or feedback forms. This will give you a better understanding of how they feel about your products and services and identify areas that need improvement:
- Send out regular CSAT surveys to gauge customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Ask for reviews after a product is purchased (perhaps sneak in a discount code as an incentive to write the review!).
- Use your community! Create a subreddit or a community page on your website with forums where customers can discuss things and propose feedback suggestions.
- Open your DMs on social media (risky, but worth it!)
2. Improve self-service options
Giving customers the power to help themselves is a great way to cut down on support tickets.
Customers appreciate being knowledgeable and having the freedom to find information on their own. Studies show that almost half of surveyed customers actually prefer to solve problems independently instead of reaching out for support.
However, it’s important to note that an equal number of customers have faced challenges with self-service options because the information provided was not sufficient.
If you haven’t already, start by creating easy-to-use self-service tools like knowledge bases, FAQ pages, customer portals, or video tutorials. Then, make sure you keep these resources up to date so that customers can find accurate answers to their questions.
These self-service options should be easily accessible and engaging. By promoting them, you can empower customers to find solutions on their own and reduce the number of incoming tickets.
3. Invest in support automation & AI
Another helpful tactic is to implement chatbots or AI-powered assistants that can independently solve simpler problems and deflect incoming inquiries from support agents.
In the past, chatbots tried to talk like humans using artificial intelligence, but they had some limitations. They could only answer simple questions and give pre-set information about products or services. When customers had more complicated questions, they often got frustrated because they had to be super specific to avoid confusion.
Things have changed. Chatbots that now blend the powers of AI and automation are able to provide more detailed and purrr-sonalized responses for your customers.
Although many teams are eager to invest more in automation, there can be some challenges along the way. In fact, over a quarter of support teams find it difficult to use automation to reduce the number of customer requests. It’s a learning process for sure.
On the bright side, a third of respondents use AI to help select conversations for quality assurance (QA) purposes. Some quality management solutions use natural language processing (NLP) to pick out conversations that are more valuable for reviewing. They focus on customer interactions that are longer and more complex, rather than ones that have common content. It’s a smart way to review conversations instead of randomly choosing which ones to look at.
Turn down the volume
Ticket Volume is an important metric that can directly impact your customer satisfaction levels and bottom line. As a customer service professional, your goal should be to manage it effectively.
You can achieve this by being proactive, offering self-service options, and using automation & AI. These strategies help you effectively handle a large number of tickets while still providing excellent customer service.
Remember, the goal is not to compromise on the quality of customer service. Instead, it’s about finding a good balance between providing great support and making your processes more efficient.
