Customers expect accurate, reliable, and responsive support, no matter what industry you are in. Whether you're managing a support team, running a business, or exploring market trends, delivering timely, accurate, and effective solutions is crucial to keeping customers satisfied and loyal.

Initially, when you are just starting out with a small team, it is easier to provide quick responses. You will try to accommodate all requests and offer a satisfactory experience to build trust at an early stage.

Based on your product and the support you offer, the customer count increases, and when it does, things will begin to change. The volume of requests increases. Customers reach out through different channels like email, chat, and social media, and even from various regions. Their questions become more diverse, covering multiple products or use cases.

At this point, how will you manage and track the multiple requests that pour in?

You will try to make a few tweaks to your current working style, help your team resolve issues promptly, and achieve targets like before.

Even if you have the most hardworking team by your side, if you do not have the right tools, visibility of the requests, keep track of the requests, and performance, it will be challenging for your organization to keep up the pace and meet your customer's expectations.

This is where reports become important. Zoho Desk offers reports that provide a clear and consolidated view of business data. This helps the team evaluate key metrics, collaborate, and work on solutions quickly.

In the scenario just described, the organization could use the following reports effectively: Reopened Tickets, Agent Performance, Customer Happiness, Tickets by Channel, and Tickets by Products.

This topic will go through the different types of reports available in Zoho Desk and how customers can benefit from them. 

The Agent Availability Report provides insights into the active working hours of agents. It calculates their login and logout time, helping managers understand agent availability during peak hours. If multiple queries come in at a specific time of day, reviewing this report helps managers identify which agents are available to handle the queries efficiently, provide prompt responses, and avoid SLA breaches.

If the requirement is to analyze query volume only by channel, the Tickets by Channel report offers a consolidated view of the number of tickets raised across various communication platforms. By evaluating this data, support managers can identify which channels are under the most pressure and reallocate resources accordingly. This targeted approach enhances team responsiveness, prevents service delays, and helps improve overall customer satisfaction by ensuring each channel is adequately staffed and managed.

The Tickets Stages report is used to understand the current stage tickets are in. When a customer query is raised, it could go through multiple statuses such as Open, In Progress, On Hold, and Awaiting Confirmation. If the queries related to product downtime are kept on hold, and the SLA is about to be breached, a manager can quickly go through the tickets, identify the reason for delays, and offer the team support to resolve the issue.

The SLA Ticket report can be used to gather clear insights on any details about SLA. It highlights the SLAs that were violated, the violation type, and the time taken to respond after SLA elapsed. This report allows support managers to analyze the frequency and causes of SLA breaches, helping to pinpoint areas of improvement, adjust workflows, and ensure timely resolution in the future.

When an agent closes a ticket without providing a thorough and clear resolution, customers may feel dissatisfied and reopen the same ticket. This often indicates inefficiency in the agent’s performance. To understand why certain queries are being reopened, managers can utilize the Reopened Tickets report. This report helps identify patterns, such as recurring issues that are frequently reopened or whether tickets closed by a specific agent are consistently being reopened. By analyzing these insights, managers can evaluate agent performance more effectively and provide targeted training to help agents improve the quality of their resolutions and reduce repeat interactions.

Apart from the reports available, custom reports can be created for specific business needs.

For example, to analyze the number of tickets that were resolved using the self-service modules available, a business can create a custom report called a Self-Service Resolution Rate Report. This can analyze resolutions related to resources like the Knowledge Base, Community, and Guided Conversations instead of reaching out to the respective SME or PM for clarity. This can provide a clear picture of how effective the available resources are. This could also potentially reduce the ticket volume.

Understanding how reports work can provide valuable insights at an organizational level. However, the true power of reports lies in their ability to dive deep into the challenges faced by individual teams or departments.

By analyzing specific data, reports can pinpoint recurring issues and inefficiencies, enabling teams to proactively address problems before they escalate rather than simply reacting to them.

Agents work on multiple tickets and they may occasionally forget the SLA for every ticket they work on. This can lead to SLA violations, which will negatively impact customer satisfaction. To prevent this, a custom SLA Violation Prediction report can be created to identify the tickets that are nearing the SLA deadlines. Managers can set up a workflow to notify the agents when the SLA is nearing a deadline.

With this report, managers can easily track tickets that are approaching the deadline and monitor agent performance to ensure they are addressing tickets promptly after receiving the SLA alert.

Using the right reports is essential for any support team to thrive in a dynamic environment; they help identify issues that can impact team performance and customer satisfaction. Once these issues are identified, teams can improve their processes by refining workflows, reallocating resources, or optimizing agent performance. Finally, by using different types of reports and continuously monitoring data, teams tend to innovate new strategies or automation to enhance support operations. By using reports effectively, teams can proactively address challenges, enhance efficiency, and stay ahead of evolving customer needs.