The one-page queue report your board should see

Time to set up

1 day, once contact reasons are in place

Cost

£0

Driver

Insights

The problem

Most executive reports on support show volume, response times and satisfaction. Those numbers describe how hard support is working. They say very little about why customers needed help in the first place.

Many contacts are caused somewhere else in the business, such as a billing error or a promise made during the sale. If the report only covers support’s performance, those causes stay out of sight and the answer defaults to more headcount.

The fix

1. Start with contact reasons. Ten or so clear reasons, each flagged as value (a contact you want) or failure (a contact caused by something not working). See Ten tags that tell you why customers call.
2. Map each failure reason to an owner. Product, billing, sales, operations or a partner. The owner is whoever controls the cause, not whoever answers the customer.
3. Build one page. Failure demand by owning team, the top three reasons, the trend against last month and one agreed action per owner.
4. Present it at the executive meeting, not at support’s own review. The people who own the causes need to see it.
5. Ask each owner to report back the following month on their action.

Tools to try

• Your helpdesk’s reporting for the monthly counts by contact reason.
• Looker Studio or Power BI for a simple trend chart by owning team.
• A one-slide template that stays the same every month, so the trend is easy to read at a glance.

How to measure it

Track failure demand as a % of total contacts, broken down by owning team, and the number of failure reasons closed each quarter. Every point that failure demand falls is work support no longer has to do.