Analyze help desk performance in Hubspot
Using Hubspot to analyze your help desk performance helps you understand how quickly your team responds, where tickets get stuck, and how satisfied your customers are. This guide explains how to use the built-in tools to monitor key metrics and improve your support operations.
Overview of help desk analysis in Hubspot
The help desk in Hubspot is centered around support tickets. Every interaction, from the first customer message to the final resolution, is captured in ticket timelines and properties. By organizing these tickets correctly and using the reporting tools, you can track speed, workload, and outcomes for your team.
Before diving into reports, make sure your tickets are:
- Created consistently for every support request
- Assigned to the right pipelines and stages
- Linked to contacts, companies, and conversations
- Updated with accurate status and resolution details
Key ticket metrics to track in Hubspot
The most important help desk metrics rely on ticket properties that Hubspot calculates or stores. These metrics show how efficiently your team resolves customer issues and where you may need to optimize processes.
Time to first response
Time to first response measures how long it takes from when a ticket is created until a support agent first responds. This is a primary indicator of responsiveness and is often tied to SLAs.
Use this metric to:
- Check whether customers receive timely acknowledgments
- Compare response speed across teams or channels
- Identify periods of the day or week where responses slow down
Time to close and resolution time
Time to close, or resolution time, measures how long it takes to fully resolve a ticket. In Hubspot, this is driven by the time between ticket creation and the moment the ticket moves into a closed or resolved stage.
Monitor this to:
- Spot complex issues that take too long to solve
- Find bottlenecks in your support workflow
- Evaluate how process changes impact resolution speed
Ticket volume and backlog
Ticket volume tells you how many new issues arrive over time, while backlog reflects how many open tickets your team is actively working on. Both metrics are derived from ticket counts and stages in Hubspot pipelines.
Use these numbers to balance workload and staffing, and to forecast busy periods that may impact customer experience.
Customer satisfaction and SLA performance
When you enable surveys and SLAs, you can connect satisfaction and compliance metrics back to tickets. This adds context to your throughput metrics and shows whether fast responses are also effective for customers.
Using Hubspot dashboards for help desk analytics
Dashboards allow you to bring multiple reports together so you can monitor your help desk at a glance. In Hubspot, you can start from service templates or build custom dashboards tailored to your team.
Create a help desk dashboard
- Navigate to your reporting or dashboards area.
- Click to create a new dashboard or modify an existing one.
- Select a service or support template as a starting point, if available.
- Add ticket-based reports that highlight your core metrics.
- Reorder and resize reports to match your team’s priorities.
Common reports to include:
- Tickets by status or stage
- Average time to first response
- Average time to close tickets
- Ticket volume over time by channel
- Open tickets by owner or team
Filter dashboards by team or pipeline
To make dashboards more actionable, apply filters that focus on specific segments. Hubspot dashboards and reports usually support filters such as:
- Ticket pipeline and ticket status
- Ticket owner or team
- Create date or close date ranges
- Source channel (email, chat, form, phone, etc.)
Use separate views for:
- Management summaries of overall performance
- Agent-specific dashboards for daily workload
- Channel-based performance (for example, chat vs. email)
Building custom ticket reports in Hubspot
Standard reports are helpful, but custom reporting gives you more control over which ticket properties you track. Hubspot provides a reporting builder where you can define exactly what you want to see.
Steps to create a custom ticket report
- Open the reports or analytics area.
- Choose to create a new report and select tickets as the primary data source.
- Pick the report type, such as bar chart, line chart, table, or pivot.
- Add dimensions like ticket status, pipeline, and owner.
- Add measures such as count of tickets, average time to first response, or average time to close.
- Apply filters for date range, channels, or specific teams.
- Save the report and add it to your Hubspot dashboard for ongoing visibility.
Useful ticket properties to include
When configuring reports, consider using these core properties:
- Ticket status and pipeline to show progress and bottlenecks
- Create date and close date to track volume and resolution time
- Ticket owner to compare workload and performance
- Source or channel to analyze how customers contact you
- Priority or SLA flags to segment urgent requests
Analyzing conversations linked to tickets in Hubspot
Tickets often originate from conversations such as email threads, chat messages, or form submissions. In Hubspot, these conversations can be associated directly with tickets, making it easier to see context and communication history within your reports.
To make the most of this link:
- Ensure conversations in the inbox are automatically converted into tickets or associated manually where needed.
- Train agents to update ticket properties when new information arrives.
- Use reporting on conversation channels to complement ticket reports.
This connection helps reveal which channels generate the most complex or time-consuming requests.
Improving help desk performance based on Hubspot data
Once you have a clear view of your metrics, use them to drive continuous improvement. Hubspot data can highlight trends and patterns that suggest where to focus.
Identify and fix bottlenecks
Look for pipeline stages where tickets remain for too long. Consider whether you need:
- Clearer ownership or escalation rules
- Better internal documentation or knowledge base content
- Automation rules to route tickets to the right team
Adjust your ticket pipeline configuration and monitor reports to confirm that the changes reduce delays.
Balance workload across agents
Reports that break down ticket volume by owner can reveal imbalances. If some agents have significantly more open tickets, customers may wait longer for help.
Use assignment rules and automation in Hubspot to distribute tickets evenly, and set expectations around maximum open tickets per agent.
Refine SLAs and response targets
Compare your actual time to first response and time to close with your current service level commitments. If you consistently miss targets, either adjust staffing and processes or redefine your SLAs to be realistic while still customer-centric.
Best practices for consistent help desk reporting in Hubspot
Accurate analytics depend on consistent ticket management. To keep your help desk reporting reliable, follow these guidelines:
- Ensure every customer issue is logged as a ticket.
- Standardize pipelines and stages across teams where possible.
- Train agents to update ticket properties and close tickets promptly.
- Review dashboards regularly and refine reports as your processes evolve.
- Document reporting definitions so everyone interprets metrics the same way.
Learn more about Hubspot help desk tools
For detailed, product-specific steps and screenshots, review the official documentation on how to analyze help desk activity in the service tools. You can access the original resource here: Hubspot help desk analysis article.
If you need broader strategy support for your service reporting ecosystem, including integration with other platforms and analytics stacks, you can also consult partners such as Consultevo for guidance.
By combining disciplined ticket management with the native dashboards and reporting tools in Hubspot, your team can gain clear visibility into help desk performance and make data-driven improvements that enhance customer satisfaction over time.
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