The Must-Have Dashboard for Managing Ticketing CX Queues

If you operate in an asynchronous environment such as a ticketing channel, one crucial dashboard you need is a view that captures your queue size at specific time intervals. In a phone channel, this isn’t as critical because calls tend to abandon after a short threshold, leading to an organic queue reduction (though this doesn't necessarily equate to a good client experience). However, in a ticketing channel, there is no such organic queue reduction, and the tickets will continue to accumulate over time.

Here are a few reasons why the workforce management team should invest time and resources in developing a dashboard that tracks how the queue changes over time:

Firstly, relying on traditional client experience metrics like service level and average speed of answer is too long of a lagging indicator and can create longer turnaround times to address capacity issues. For example, if the ticket queue starts building up, your operations will be blind to any capacity issues until the buried tickets are addressed. Depending on the size of the queue buildup, it could take hours or even days before realizing there is a capacity challenge.

Secondly, an operator can have someone actively monitor the queue size constantly, but this requires staffing a team to cover all hours of operation, including accounting for shrinkage. Furthermore, it’s difficult to separate signal from noise in a queue buildup because the real-time monitoring team won’t have historical data to determine if a specific queue buildup should be a concern or trivial. Lastly, it requires a heavy investment of time from operational leaders to continually train the real-time monitoring team on acceptable queue size thresholds as the business evolves.

Related to the above point, having a historical view of queue sizes allows programming a few functions that a larger real-time monitoring team would usually conduct. Based on the queue size and threshold, the function can automatically trigger a notification to operational stakeholders that capacity could be challenged. Additionally, the programmed function could automatically and proportionally reallocate skill sets from one group to another based on severity of the capacity issue. Lastly, if programmed correctly, the time to address capacity challenges from notification to action will be almost instantaneous, preventing significant queue buildup.

One might think capturing this view is easy, but at least with certain ticketing providers, there is no out-of-the-box solution for this view. Therefore, it requires a bit of technical solutioning. My personal belief is that it’s worth it because it will be another important tool to reduce the frequency and severity of queue buildup, which will inevitably affect customer experience. Furthermore, depending on the technical aptitude of the operations, it will also help contain real-time monitoring costs for the Workforce Management departments.

Seen an example of a queue view dashboard that updates every 15 minutes

The signal of the orange line queue build up started on June 29 and the burn down started to occur June 30