Hi everyone,

Declan here, leader of our Support team at Intercom. I’ve worked with many Support tools throughout my career and one of the most important features is a real time view of the state of the queues (or “the inboxes” as we call them at Intercom).

The Real-time dashboard feature within Intercom is my go-to space every morning and throughout the day to understand how many conversations are waiting, for how long and for which sub-teams within my organisation. This gives me the high level overview I need and helps me pinpoint where I need to follow up with my team to re-allocate resources or strategise around further capacity planning. You can learn more about the feature here and you can use whatever filters make sense for you and your team, but I would recommend always keeping an eye on Waiting for First Reply. This shows you how many customers have opened a conversation but have not had anyone from the team respond to them yet, which we refer to as our backlog. 

How manageable the total number in your backlog is depends on the SLAs you’ve committed to for your customers, how many teammates you have online and how many conversations you expect them to deal with per day. If you’d like to chat more about managing your backlog, setting KPIs for your team or how to plan your Support team’s headcount let me know in response to this post and I can share more details! 

Thanks!