Blog · Territory, capacity and quota planning · Customer service
How a customer service leader finds the tickets that a help article, a product change or an onboarding step would have prevented, from the ticket export: tickets by category and sub-category, the share that are how-to against fault, the how-to questions that recur across accounts, whether a help article exists for each and whether it was viewed before the ticket, the handling time consumed, and the deflection list ranked by hours a month.
A support team answers the same question about exports two hundred times a month, and each answer is a ticket, a reply and twenty minutes. The ticket export knows the question recurs, whether an article exists, and what it costs. This guide sets out the how-to split, the recurring clusters, the article check, and the deflection list.
Per ticket:
Kind: how-to or fault, from category or classification Cluster, for how-to tickets: the recurring question it belongs to Article exists for the cluster; viewed by the account before the ticket
Per cluster, per month:
Tickets, accounts, handling hours Article state: none; exists, viewed; exists, not viewed
Account identifiers only.
tickets = how-to + fault + other, per period
Every ticket in one kind. Unclassified tickets are counted and clustered where the wording allows.
How-to tickets: 1,840 a month, 610 handling hours.
| Cluster | Tickets | Accounts | Hours/month | Article | Viewed before ticket | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| How to schedule an export | 210 | 140 | 70 | None | Write it | |
| Where to change the billing contact | 160 | 150 | 27 | Exists | 8% | Placement: link from billing page |
| How to add a team member | 140 | 120 | 23 | Exists | 61% | Article unclear: rewrite |
| Why the report totals differ | 90 | 40 | 60 | None | Product: show the definition in the report | |
| Password reset for SSO accounts | 85 | 80 | 14 | Exists | 12% | Placement |
Top five clusters: a third of how-to hours. Two need an article, two need the article found, one needs the product to say something.
| Article state | Fix | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| None | Write it | Support content |
| Exists, not viewed | Naming, search, placement | Support content, product |
| Exists, viewed, ticket anyway | Rewrite, or the product | Support content, product |
Per cluster, tickets per month after the fix. A cluster that does not fall was not fixed by what was done, and the row says so.
How-to and fault blended. The deflection list is full of bugs.
Clusters unnamed. The same question counted as two hundred different tickets.
Article existence unchecked. Articles written that already exist.
Ranked by count. The two-minute question over the hour one.
Mapped once, the ticket export and the help centre produce the how-to split, the clusters, the article state and the deflection list ranked by hours every month. Covirage builds this from the exports as they are. The customer service page describes the setup, and the effort per account guide covers the accounts the how-to hours concentrate in.
By sub-category where the desk has one, and by the ticket's subject and first message clustered on wording where it does not. The grouping proposes; a support lead confirms the clusters and names them. Once named, the cluster is a row that can be tracked month to month.
That the article is there and the customer did not find it, which is a search, naming or placement problem rather than a writing one. Where the help centre logs views by account, the join says which. It is a different fix from no article at all.
Because a question asked eighty times that takes two minutes is less than one asked twenty times that takes an hour. Handling time per cluster is the cost, and the deflection list is ranked on it.