Are you monitoring the average time taken to assign tickets in your help desk?

Monitoring the time taken to assign tickets is an important metric for any help desk because it can provide useful insights into areas that need immediate attention such as technician availability, their work schedules and even your ticket assignment model. Consider this example: If a ticket raised at 9am is resolved at 8pm, it means the ticket resolution time is 11 hours leading you believe your technicians aren't resolving tickets fast-enough. But if you look at the ticket assigned time, it can tell you that the ticket was actually assigned to your technician only at 3pm, which means the ticket resolution time is a mere 5 hours which is a pretty good number, compared to 11. By monitoring the time taken to assign tickets, you can get greater visibility into the actual time spent by your technicians for each ticket, and have complete control over your help desk work flow.

But monitoring ticket assigned time for individual tickets is cumbersome; instead, you can calculate the average value ticket assignment time.

Average time to assign tickets = Total time taken to assign tickets / no. of tickets assigned to agents during the said period.

The below graph shows the average time to assign tickets by hour for the last 6 months. You can see that the average time to assign tickets is high during the following hours: 12midnight to 2am, 5am to 8am, 12pm to 3pm and 9pm to 11pm. Using these visual cues, you can look into what's causing this and take necessary actions. In our experience, higher assignment times indicate unavailability of technicians, or high ticket inflow.