How to Perform a Health Check on Your Support Processes

If you’ve inherited a support org or simply haven’t taken a close look in a while, it might be time for a health check. Whether you’re scaling, optimizing, or just trying to regain visibility, Zendesk offers rich tools and data—but only if you’re asking the right questions.

This guide can work with other ticketing systems as well! A lot of support processes are consistent across tools and organizations, so you can use this as a step-by-step guide to understanding your current support operations, surfacing hidden inefficiencies using a data-centric approach, and laying the groundwork for meaningful improvements.

🧭 Start with Views: Your Frontline Lens

Zendesk Views are your real-time x-ray. They show what’s happening right now—but only if they’re configured to show what matters. Here's what to check:

• Unassigned Tickets: How many tickets are sitting idle without an owner?

• Your Unsolved Tickets: Useful for understanding individual agent workload.

• Upcoming SLA Breaches: Views that surface tickets approaching SLA in the next 2 hours and 1 hour. Bonus: Set up Slack alerts for visibility.

• Pending Tickets: Are tickets lingering here too long? Set a follow-up cadence.

• Tickets Open > X Days: Stale tickets often point to product, process, or ownership issues.

• Recently Solved/Recently Updated: Show activity across the team. Track solved time and recent changes to in-progress tickets. Identify gaps in reply times.

• Problem Tickets: Review linked incidents and volume to identify major recurring issues.

  
  

Tip: If you find yourself segmenting views by too many variables (assignee, status, time), consider customizing multiple views or filtering using Explore.

📊 Validate the Data Behind the Views

Before diving into metrics, check your data integrity. Incomplete or inconsistent ticket fields will skew your analysis.

• Are any required fields missing on solved tickets?

• Are issue categories, support tiers, and other dropdowns being applied consistently?

• Are you using tags or structured fields for escalations, engineering involvement, or ticket source?

  
  

Bad data = bad reporting.

📁 Personal Views for Power Users

Personal views are critical for team leads, QA, or ops folks who want to dig deeper:

• CSAT Breakdown: Good/Bad with and without comments. Are they product related or agent service related?

• All Ticket History (Exclude Merges): Great for audits and exporting for manual reporting.

• Escalations Between Tiers: Are macros available for tagging and are they being used properly? Are escalations documented with research and findings?

• Engineering-Linked Tickets: Are you tracking tickets with linked bugs? (Jira, Shortcut, etc)

• SLA Failures ("Kicked SLAs"): Is there a macro + tag + process in place to identify when an agent has to send a generic reply to satisfy an SLA?

  
  

📈 Zendesk Explore: Metrics That Matter

These are the core metrics that tell the story of performance and process maturity:

📉 Quality & Speed

• CSAT and Response Rate: Are trends positive or declining?

• SLA Attainment: By calendar and business hours—how consistent are you?

• Resolution Times: Escalated vs not. Trend over time?

  
  

📬 Channel Breakdown

• Volume by Channel: Where are tickets coming from?

• Number of Agent Reply's To Resolution: How much effort does it take to solve tickets?

  
  

📚 Categorization

• Issue Categories by Volume: Trends over time? Any emerging hotspots? Do you need to create more sub categories under large volume categories for better reporting?

• Time Tracking per Category: (if you use the Time Tracking app)

  
  

🧳 Backlog Health

• Aging Tickets: What’s stuck, and why?

• Bugs Attached: How many open tickets are linked to bugs?

• Backlog by Priority and Trends

  
  

🔁 Escalation Metrics

• Between Support Tiers: How often and why?

• To Engineering: What’s the average wait time? What's the avg resolution time and outliers?

• Escalation Trend: Rising? Stable?

  
  

⚙️ Process Deep Dive: Where Things Break or Scale

Zendesk Setup

• Ticket Creation Paths: How are tickets created? Email, in-app, Slack, Help Center, etc.

• Ticket Fields: Are they useful? Required? Routinely filled out?

• Macros/Triggers/Automations: Is routing logic in place? Do pending tickets auto-close after X days? Are customers notified in advance to prompt a reply?

• Integrations: Asana, Jira, Salesforce, Thena, Birdie? Are key fields (e.g., organizations, users, MRR, plan, support tier) syncing correctly?

• User Verification: How do you confirm identity/permissions?

• Encrypted Message Handling: How do you send and receive sensitive data via ticket? Do you use Virtru or something similar?

  
  

Knowledge and Documentation

• Help Center Workflow: Who owns it? How often is it reviewed? What is the process to identify improvements and make updates?

• Internal Process and Knowledge Documentation: Is there a single source of truth? Is technical knowledge documented? How do you track a backlog of things that need to be added?

  
  

🛠 Engineering & Product Collaboration

• Escalation Process: Is it documented? Are handoffs clean?

• Incident Workflow: Does support play a role in kicking off an incident, comms or follow-up?

• Bug/Feature Reporting: How are tickets tagged and followed up on? Is there a notification when fixes are shipped?

• Meetings with Product/Eng: Are there regular reviews to prioritize from the customer support lens?

• Engineering/Product Team Mapping: Which engineering teams own which product areas/features/integrations? Does Support know who to reach out to when issues arise?

  
  

👥 People & Operations

• Shifts, Locations, and Roles: Are there any coverage gaps?

• Competencies: Are the right people taking the right tickets?

• Capacity Model: Do you know what your team can realistically handle?

  
  

📈 Ongoing Monitoring

Build a dashboard to monitor these key signals weekly or monthly:

• CSAT

• SLA Attainment

• Response/Resolution Times

• Backlog Aging

• Escalation Rates (Support Tiers and Engineering)

• One-Touch Solve Rate

• Solved Volume

• Time Tracking by Category

  
  

Final Thoughts

Running a healthy support org using Zendesk isn’t just about dashboards and macros—it’s about knowing how your agents are performing individually, where things are breaking, what’s getting better, and what to automate or eliminate entirely.

Performing this type of health check quarterly or even twice a year can help you proactively manage performance, prevent customer pain, and elevate support’s role within your organization.