What is ticket volume?

Why it matters

Raw ticket volume is the number executives ask about and the number least worth targeting. A growing company should expect growing volume. What matters is whether volume per customer is falling, which is the only version of the metric that reflects product and documentation quality.

What to know

• Normalise by active customers or usage, or growth will look like a support failure.
• Volume by topic is where the actionable signal lives, and it requires tagging discipline to exist at all.
• Spikes usually trace to a release, an outage, an email campaign, or a billing run, and all four are predictable.
• Contacts per customer falling while total volume rises is the signature of a healthy scaling support function.
• Volume reduction targets can be met by making it harder to contact you, which is why satisfaction must be watched alongside.

How to calculate it

An example

Example: volume rises thirty percent year on year and the executive team panics. Customer count rose forty percent, so contacts per customer actually fell. The support function got more efficient and the headline number implied the opposite.

Common mistakes

• Targeting raw volume reduction without normalising for growth
• Reducing volume by hiding contact options
• Reporting total volume without topic breakdown
• Treating a predictable seasonal spike as an anomaly every year

Questions