As a Customer Success Manager at HubSpot, I often hear from customers that Average Time To Close Tickets is a core KPI for their support teams. This is because it measures what customers care about most: how quickly their problems are resolved.
This isn’t surprising - faster ticket resolutions lead to better customer experiences and higher CSAT scores. Below are three quick, practical steps you can make in HubSpot to reduce your Average Time to Close, each taking less than 10 minutes to implement.
(1) Automate notifications when tickets are triaged
To ensure that the relevant teams and team members are made aware the moment tickets are triaged into their queue, set up Workflows (video tutorial) that automate internal notifications when a ticket is assigned to them. For example, if your support representative triages a technical support ticket to your engineering team, your engineers could immediately be informed via an in-app or internal email notification.
If you use Slack or Teams and have connected them to your HubSpot account, you can also send custom Slack notifications and/or Microsoft Teams notifications.
You can further boost efficiency by automating the ticket triage. If tickets are created through form submissions from your customers, you can set up Workflows that automatically assigns the ticket to the right team based on the response to specific form question(s). As a best practice, these form questions used in your Workflow triggers should be a dropdown field.
(2) Use Snippets to reduce time spent on typing responses
Snippets are short, reusable text blocks that can be used across HubSpot, including in tickets and Help Desk conversations. Use them to quickly populate standardised and modular responses, reducing the time it takes for your team to type responses. Examples include:
- Standard introductions and closures: professional greetings that include personalisation tokens
- Troubleshooting steps and checklists: bulleted instructions for common technical fixes
- Information request: requesting for common follow-up information required to progress the ticket
(3) Ticket Summary
When multitasking and switching between multiple active tickets, support representatives can lose valuable time re-reading histories to remember where they left off or what the ticket is about. Instead of scrolling through a long thread of emails, use the AI-generated ticket summary to gain a quick understanding of the ticket.
To quantify the impact of these implementations, leverage the Average Time To Close report in your Service Analytics suite. Comparing your “before and after” data will allow you to show clear efficiency gains in your support process.
If you need any guidance in setting these up, do reach out to our Support Team!
What’s next?
Reducing your average time to close is a great first step toward efficiency, but you can further scale your support team by reducing ticket volume at the source. To learn how to move from reactive support to a more scalable model, dive into this article: Reducing Ticket Volume