Best practices for reporting ticket trends/patterns & make them actionable

We have some custom fields in tickets to help track patterns. 

(1) area of the application (I work at a software company, so these are areas of our software that is being asked about or a bug reported on).  This field is not required, but is filled out fairly consistently.

(2) resolution type - this is a filed about how the ticket was solved (did support do it on their own or did they involve another team or process).  This field is required to solve a ticket.

Together these two fields give us an overview of the types of issues we see in tickets.  Custom fields are pretty easy to report on in Explore.

Hi Allen, in addition to the great comments from Hillary, our article "Using the metrics that matter to improve customer support" might prove helpful. It's focused on Zendesk Explore, but the principles are similar whatever you are using to report with.

See https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037540954

@Hillary Latham Thanks! For the area of application, how many levels are you capturing? In other words, how granular do you get?

For example, do you start with the name of the software (e.g. "TurboTax"), then list the major features (e.g. "Account management"), then the common areas users have questions/issues (e.g. "Login problem"), etc.? This approach should provide good insights, assuming we do a good job with identifying the right taxonomy.

We use a combination of custom fields (using conditional logic) to help the user identify their issue and agent-added tags to fully understand what trends the agents are seeing.  You can also get some valuable insights from the Guide usage.  I recently reviewed the top-viewed articles and then looked at the search terms (especially those with no results) and have identified several interesting things which are being verified via experiments on our site.

Full Disclosure - I'm still using Insights because I built the dashboards and reports there already and haven't made the time to learn Explore and migrate everything over.

We also document similar to others a couple of fields called Issue Type and Resolution type-based on the specific case. Issue type might be something like "General Question", "User Error", "Feature Request" etc and then Resolution Type we have a drop-down to select what we did to resolve it-for example fix our documentation, provide training/etc, created a product bug jira, etc. 

However what I have found to be super helpful so far is in digging through our search data in the Reporting area (outside of explore on the agent side)-what terms are people searching and specifically what searches end up in creation of tickets. I sort by those first and then do some comparing manually over time periods I can see which issues are being reported or searched over and over again. I use these to either create KB articles to allow for self-service or talk with our Product teams to see what I can find out if this is a common area people are tripped up on and why to see if we can help clarify this. This has probably been more useful to me than anything else but requires some manual effort on my part at the moment which I would love to automate more as we progress in our knowledge of use of the Zendesk platform. 

@Allen Lai - we aren't too granular.  We do have some subcategories using the :: feature.  Mostly, we have different fields/forms for each application and then then field for the application are just major areas of the application.   Some of the areas are large, but we haven't gotten more granular just yet.

Our Tier 2 team just implemented a new field for themselves to help breakdown the types of questions they get, so with the two fields, you can see where there are patterns.