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We're a pretty small support team here at Tiller and we're thinking about how best to increase our efficiency in 2023. I'll share some context, but am really looking for insight into how others are doing this / set up to see if that inspires us to change some aspects of our process.

 

We have our inbox organized into about 5 teams, that are sort of specific to product area. E.g. billing team, bank data feeds team, workflows/tools/templates team and so on.

 

We have about ~400 new conversations a week. Our average hours to close a conversation (not including those escalated to one of our vendors that generally will take much longer) is about 25 hours. We don't offer live chat and our average first response time is about 2 hours.

 

To help us set goals and boundaries on expected workload each day we have " catch up thresholds" - each team has a specific threshold based on the urgency/type of issue. Bank data feeds issues are our highest priority and during our high volume season (now) the threshold is "medium" or "high" and we try to work the bank feeds inbox down to the point where the waiting longest conversation is no more than 1 day (medium) or 2 days (high).

 

In periods of lower volume we'll decrease the threshold to 18 hrs, 12 hrs, or 0 to try and clear it completely by the end of the day.

 

We have 2 full time support staff and 3 part time support staff. Amount the different team inboxes there are some specialists that work in only one area and others that are generalists who contribute it all areas.

 

The challenge is in order to report on our performance around getting things caught up to this threshold, we have to track this outside of Intercom. We use a spreadsheet and a checkbox daily. But this is cumbersome to remember to "check the box" at the end of the day if you got it caught up. One person is responsible for this checkbox, but if she's out we may miss a day of reporting. We use this metric to help us model projections of conversation load, when we may need to adjust the thresholds, and when to hire more support staff.

 

So I'm wondering, how do others manage this or are we just completely unique in our need to do this? Or is our team too small for the volume of conversations we have and we should hire more people, and be aiming to completely clear everything by the end of the day? How do you do it?

 

We do use Resolution Bot and Custom Bots and have an extensive help center so folks do a lot of self serve, but some issues they just need to write in about. We're not using SLAs or Tickets. SLAs don't seem to fit this need I'm describing. We may move to using Tickets this year as some issues are definitely more technical and require our vendor and can't be solved via the chat.

Looping in @Cyan Cone 7​ and @user368​, one of our Intercom community experts in case they can provide any advice on that 🙌

Thanks for tagging @diana t12​ .

@heather p​ I'm not sure why SLAs don't fit your need. Unfortunately, we don't operate in a similar way and don't get the kind of volume of conversations that you do.

I would assume you can keep track of this with SLAs + Reports on Intercom. The reports on Intercom automatically track if your team is hitting SLAs or not. In order to handle the different SLAs during different seasons. just have 2 SLA rules but have one of them live as required.

Thanks for your answer @user368​ - the SLA's don't fit this need because they're about first and next response times, not reporting on how "caught up" the inboxes were. We are not using the SLA feature right now, as I mentioned before, so perhaps it offers this type of reporting and I'm misunderstanding that. Do you have some screenshots of an example you can share that would demonstrate how SLA would work for what I'm describing. We don't want to pay additional monthly fees for a feature we're not sure is actually going to meet a need.

I see. I'm not entirely sure how exactly you measure being "caught up". We don't use the reports either which is a paid feature since we don't operate in that manner. From what I see, you can get a team performance report which gives you median time to close and number of conversations closed by each teammate.

I don't really see the performance report as the answer either. It won't tell me whether at the end of the day inbox for team A had no conversations older than 1 day.

 

We sort inboxes by waiting longest and work our inboxes down (respond) to a "threshold" based on our volume at the time. If it's below the threshold it's "caught up" - there is no report in Intercom I can find that tells me when something is "caught up" for the day. We have to rely on someone checking a box outside of Intercom in a spreadsheet to get any sort of reporting on this. It's not feasible for us to work everything down to 0 right now, and the # closed doesn't reflect whether there were 20 conversations where the last response was 2-3 days ago.

Hi @heather p​ ,

 

If I understand correctly, you would like to have a report that shows you if you have any tickets that are "caught up" or your performance against your thresholds.

 

If that is the case, I would advise you a real time dashboard app, and a report can be customised for you to show you such caught up conversations as long as they are tied to a specific waiting time. This can help you even with automation rather than the checkbox.

 

Full disclaimer: I work for such a similar app, but I still think that this could generally help you with a workaround, as long as the SLA isn't the right answer for you.

 

Hope it helps!

Hello Heather,

 

I am in the same boat as you. It is about being able to proactively shift your priorities before you know you need to shift them. Now that Intercom has sub statuses, could you use sub statuses as a state to mark the ticket as “caught up”. That way, you can use many of the pre built reports and make your own reports.

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