Perhaps a significant outage occurred, or holiday shipping delays have caused a monstrous ticket backlog that keeps growing every hour in your team’s inbox. Meanwhile, customers are still expecting quick, efficient, and quality responses. They don't care about your backlog—they just need answers.
Simply asking your team to work three times harder isn’t a sustainable solution. While this might provide short-term relief, it won't serve you in the long term. To tackle this situation, you need the right performance metrics to make strategic decisions. You also need tools and systems to empower your team to address the backlog and get back to normal as quickly as possible.
In this article, we’ll explore the best metrics for measuring your ticket backlog and seven hacks to get your ticket volume back under control.
How to measure and assess ticket backlog
Your ticket backlog is the list of unresolved cases in your support inbox. Since your team’s capacity is limited, tracking the backlog helps you stay ahead of incoming requests. It also provides insights into when to adjust capacity or manage customer expectations if you’re falling behind.
Here’s a breakdown of key metrics to help you measure and assess your ticket backlog effectively.
Number of tickets in the backlog
Monitoring the total number of tickets in your support queue is crucial. If you’re looking at a chart that trends upward, it's a clear sign that the backlog is increasing.
Ticket status
Not all backlogged tickets are the same, though. It’s helpful to categorize cases into three phases:
Active: cases that are being worked on actively.
Pending: cases awaiting additional action outside of the support team's control (e.g., waiting for a customer response).
Inactive: cases that are open but not currently being worked on (e.g., awaiting product team review).
This segmentation helps determine the workload balance between your support and other responsible teams. It also provides visibility into cases that may cause delays or dissatisfaction if left unresolved.
Ticket age
You can gain deeper insights by segmenting pending tickets based on aging categories in your helpdesk views, for example:
Unresolved tickets waiting for over 24 hours
Unresolved tickets waiting for over 48 hours
Unresolved tickets waiting for more than a week
Segmenting tickets by age helps you prioritize cases and assess the urgency of the backlog. For example, tickets older than a week may indicate a risk of customer dissatisfaction and require immediate action.
Ticket priority
Additionally, reporting on backlog volume by priority allows you to pinpoint which inquiries require immediate attention and prioritize critical tickets, while lower-priority ones can be deferred until the backlog is under control. It’s a great way to ensure you’re tackling the most important issues first.
Ticket age over time
Tracking the average or median ticket age over time enables you to monitor how long tickets stay in the backlog. For example, you can look at how the backlog is aging at the end of each period to identify trends.
If the ticket age keeps increasing, it might be time to boost capacity and add more AI automation to streamline workflows.
Backlogged tickets per agent
Each agent has an average number of tickets they can handle daily. If the backlog exceeds this number, the overflow will continue to grow unless you add automation or increase headcount.
To make this data actionable, you can calculate your backlog per agent coefficient:
Number of tickets in the backlog ÷ Number of agents ÷ Number of tickets an agent can handle per day
If the coefficient is higher than 1, your team is overwhelmed and needs more support.
If it’s below 1, your team has some extra capacity for non-queue tasks, such as training or documentation.
Number of tickets handled per day
This metric is simple but powerful. If the backlog consistently grows faster than your team can resolve tickets each day, you’ll need to scale your support efforts—whether that means adding headcount, utilizing automation, or implementing more efficient processes.
7 hacks to tackle and reduce your overflowing backlog
When your team is drowning in a massive backlog, it can feel overwhelming. But before jumping into action, the first step is always communication. There's nothing more demotivating for your agents than being asked to work overtime without understanding what caused the issue, how long it might last, or what the plan is to fix it.
That’s why having a clear communication strategy is critical. Make sure you share with your team not only why the backlog happened but also what steps leadership is taking — or will take — to resolve the underlying issues. This transparency goes a long way in keeping everyone on the same page.
Next comes the challenge of addressing the backlog while still delivering a great customer experience.
I’ve seen companies sending bulk emails like "We’re behind, here’s a link to our help center — reply if you still need help," and then closing all tickets, hoping that customers will never come back.
Often, the backlog grows because there's been an issue, and customers are already frustrated. You definitely don’t want to make things worse.
Instead, it's better to be upfront with customers. Let them know you're backlogged but working hard to respond to everyone. This builds trust and keeps the relationship positive.
Once that initial message goes out, though, you still have to tackle the backlog. So, how do you do it? Let’s dive into seven effective strategies.
1. Analyze the backlog’s structure
When you’re dealing with a large backlog, it's tempting to dive straight into clearing it. However, it's crucial to analyze the structure of these requests and address the root issues.
While you might not have the time or resources to manually sift through hundreds of tickets, tools like SentiSum can automatically analyze, tag, and categorize backlogged tickets. This helps identify the underlying causes of the volume increase and allows you to separate tickets that need personalized attention from those that can be handled more efficiently.
For instance, if the backlog is due to delayed shipments, you can automatically apply a “delayed order” label to relevant tickets and use a macro to send an apology email with personalized tracking links.
Meanwhile, tickets related to other issues can be handled manually by your team.
2. Use bots and FAQ pages to address common issues
If the backlog is still growing and unresolved issues are piling up, one way to reduce incoming volume is to guide customers toward self-service solutions. A chatbot on your homepage can prompt customers to select the issue they’re contacting you about, providing them with up-to-date information on the known problem without waiting for a human response.
Alternatively, you can send out an email to the affected customer base, sharing links to FAQ pages or providing updates on the issues causing the backlog. This proactive approach can help deflect some of the ticket inflow while your team works to catch up.
3. Triage for faster resolutions
Triaging tickets based on their themes or urgency is another way to work through a backlog efficiently. By assigning tickets to agents based on their expertise in specific areas, you can reduce context-switching and make the most of your team’s strengths.
You can even implement chat prompts that ask customers to indicate the urgency and theme of their request. However, be aware that customers might exaggerate the urgency of their issue to get a faster response.
For larger backlogs, dedicating an agent to triage tickets full-time can be helpful. This ensures that tickets are routed to the right team or agent quickly, speeding up resolution times. If certain issues usually get escalated, having the right team members handle those straight away can also prevent unnecessary delays.
4. Motivate your team with incentives
To keep your team motivated while they work through a heavy backlog, consider offering group incentives when certain milestones are reached.
For example, if the backlog is cleared by day X, you could reward the team with an afternoon off or a fun activity.
Small gestures, like a $20 bonus when the queue is back under control, can go a long way in showing your appreciation and boosting team morale.
5. Create a leaderboard for friendly competition
A leaderboard can inspire friendly competition and encourage your team to push harder when tackling a temporary backlog.
With tools like Geckoboard, you can set up leaderboards and track key performance indicators (KPIs) across the team to ensure fairness and transparency. The main KPIs to track include:
Average response and resolution time per agent to measure speed and efficiency.
Average tickets handled per day to evaluate agent productivity.
First contact resolution rate per agent to assess the efficiency of handling cases independently.
CSAT or customer effort score (CES) to measure the quality of support provided.
The CES score is a better indicator of agent performance than CSAT, which can be influenced by factors beyond the agent's control, such as product quality or process issues. If implementing the CES metrics isn’t an option and you have to rely on the CSAT, clarify to agents that it’s just one aspect of the overall evaluation as it’s not entirely within their control.
6. Implement a bonus structure for long-term motivation
While leaderboards are great for short-term motivation, a robust bonus structure tied to measurable performance metrics can provide long-term incentives.
Be cautious when selecting a single metric, such as ticket volume or response time, as it may encourage cherry-picking, with agents prioritizing easier or newer tickets for the sake of bonuses. A round-robin ticket assignment system can help prevent this and keep morale high.
A better solution can be using a weighted scoring system based on key metrics that matter most to your team, such as first resolution rate, response time, or customer effort score.
7. All hands on deck: consider company-wide support
When a backlog gets out of control, rallying non-frontline staff or even the entire company to help clear the queue can be an effective solution. A great example is Slack’s 2015 outage, where a cross-functional team came together to respond to every customer complaint, sending out dozens of replies per minute to catch up with the backlog.
If your support team can’t handle a backlog within a reasonable timeframe, consider having managers, team leads, and even other departments set daily ticket goals, cancel non-essential meetings, and focus on the support queue until things become more manageable.
This all-hands-on-deck approach fosters unity and builds team spirit as everyone works together toward the common goal of eliminating the backlog.
Equip your team to manage the backlog efficiently
Your support team can only do so much when the incoming ticket volume exceeds their capacity. Even with training and process improvements, there’s a limit to what they can handle.
One solution for long-term success is bringing in additional headcount. Expanding your team allows you to distribute the workload more effectively, reducing stress and improving the overall quality of support.
But before you hire, consider automating processes that could lighten the load on your existing team. For instance, Swifteq's automation apps for Zendesk allow you to automatically tag, assign, and address common inquiries. This means your team can focus on solving complex problems instead of wasting time on routine manual tasks.
Book a free demo today to see how Swifteq can help your support team manage backlog more efficiently and deliver top-notch customer service.
Written by Maryna Paryvai Maryna is a results-driven CX executive passionate about efficient and human-centric customer support. She firmly believes that exceptional customer experiences lie at the heart of every successful business. |