Understanding Reports in Help Scout

Now that you're well on your way to providing your customers with an excellent support experience, it's time to grab a cup of coffee and take a peek at our handy Reports feature. Help Scout provides a handful of reports to help you get a handle on what's happening on the support front, day in and day out. 

Report Types 

You'll find six reports (seven if you have Docs installed) which can be viewed at any time via the Reports dropdown menu. 

All Channels

The All Channels report shows you how much volume you're handling during a certain time period, how busy you've been, how your customers contact you, and what types of issues keep popping up. 

Email

The Email report measures your team interactions with email messages. You'll be able to keep tabs on how well the team is performing in terms of time spent addressing and responding to email conversations. 

Chat

The Chat report gives you a view into your team's workload using in chat. Look here for both your team's performance and your customer's utilization of Beacon with chat. 

Phone

The Phone report tracks the volume of phone conversations recorded and shows you the number of customers you're communicating with via the phone.  

Company and User

The Company and User reports make it very easy to get insights about how members of your team are doing. In addition to high-level metrics for each person, you can look through a user's entire conversation history for a specified time period and sort by the metrics that matter most. 

Happiness

Ensuring your customers' happiness is every company's end goal, no? The Happiness report is a simple but powerful tool to help you measure just that: happiness. You'll be able to view how your team and individual users are being rated by customers and view the accompanying conversations.

Docs

If you have our Docs feature installed, the Docs report will come in handy to help you understand what your customers are searching for, what they're finding (and not finding), as well as what percentage of customers are still contacting you for help after browsing.

General Features

Conversation drilldowns

If you saw that 5% of email conversations took 2+ days to reply, you'd probably want to take a look and find out what happened. Thankfully, all of that data is just a click or two away. You can even click on single conversations and read the most recent interactions without ever leaving the page!

Popover definitions

Ever wonder exactly how a certain metric is calculated? Well, wonder no more! Simply hover over the metric name and boom! You'll get a popover definition of precisely how it's calculated. Each article linked above has a section of metrics definitions for you too. 

Filtering options

Views allow you to filter data by inbox, tag, folder, custom fields, or conversation type. You can add or edit views at any time while viewing a report, and the new data will load right away. Read more about Views: Use Views to Filter Reporting Data. 

Calculations for the Email report

In the past, we built reports from all conversations that were Active or updated within the time period. While this approach works well for most metrics, it's problematic for response/resolution metrics and includes conversations that can dilute the numbers.

Our current logic calculates numbers from a more narrow pool of conversations. Response metrics are only calculated on replies during the time period and Resolution metrics are only calculated on conversations resolved during the time period.

Examples

Let's say you have three conversations:

• Conversation A - Created Jan 1, resolved Jan 30
• Conversation B - Created Jan 8, resolved Jan 9
• Conversation C - Created Jan 16, resolved Jan 17

If you do a report for Jan 7-21, the original logic would include all three conversations when calculating the numbers, even though Conversation A wasn't created or resolved in the time period. This approach causes a lot of overlap from week to week. Moreover, if you added up the "Resolved" count for each individual week, the totals wouldn't match the monthly count.

The updated logic will only include Conversations B and C in the calculations for Jan 7-21. Conversation A is not included, as it was not replied to or resolved in the time period. By filtering out long-running conversations that are reported on elsewhere, it results in lower and more accurate Response/Resolution metrics. In addition, the weekly counts add up when compared to the monthly count.

Common Questions