Freshworks Partner

When you're running a large support team, reporting comes with its own set of unique challenges and requirements. Depending on what kind of industry you’re in, your KPIs for customer support can depend on the way your business is set up and the processes you have in place to talk to your customers. 

This can get tedious to manage, especially when you have several departments working together to resolve issues, where measuring turnaround times between groups and individual performance will need a lot more drilling-down than usual.
While Freshdesk’s in-built reports do a good job of covering several key metrics in your support process and make it easy for you to identify areas to improve, there’s also a need for business intelligence teams to dig deeper into complex metrics and understand underlying patterns. This can be critical to your organization if you're used to performing sophisticated analysis on large volumes of data, and have a need to make evidence-based decisions regularly. 

In order to make sure that we offer flexibility to businesses who operate at this scale, Freshdesk lets you export ticket activities from your helpdesk and use it the way you want.

Building custom reports with ticket activities
The ticket activities export feature in Freshdesk gives you complete access to key information in your account, so that you can build your reports the way you want. This is done by capturing ticket activities automatically when actions are performed in your helpdesk. The export will contain all the events that took place in all of your tickets the previous day (including the ones performed by Automations). 

Account Admins can configure the data export to happen at the end of each day.  Once it’s configured, you’ll automatically receive a complete dump of ticket activities in your helpdesk at the end of a day. The data can further be used with third-party business intelligence tools like Tableau or Power BI to create and visualize your own custom reports.

For example, here are some of the things you would do if you were an e-commerce business:

• Track the resolution time of tickets assigned to a particular group (say, comparing the delivery time of different logistics vendors)

• Understand the resolution time by support agent, excluding the time taken by other teams

• Track the response time of tickets from the moment they were assigned to an Agent in your team

  
  

Setting up ticket activities export in your Freshdesk account

Note: The export you receive from Freshdesk for this purpose will be in JSON format; you might require assistance from a developer to use it with third-party BI tools.

• Login to your support portal as an Account Admin.

• Go to Reports > Schedule Export. 

• Enable the Daily export of ticket activities.

• Click Edit to access your API URL. Copy and paste the URL in your Business Intelligence tool.

• Once you hit the API from your BI tool, it will return a link to the latest export file. 

• Download the JSON from the link, which will be available for 30 days from the date of creation.

Here is a sample of the JSON:

{
  "metadata": {
    "start_at": "20-04-2017 10:00:00 +0000",
    "end_at": "21-04-2017 09:59:59 +0000",
    "activities_count": 2
  },
  "activities_data": [
    {
      "performed_at": "21-04-2017 09:33:38 +0000",
      "ticket_id": 600,
      "performer_type": "user",
      "performer_id": 149018,
      "activity": {
        "note": {
          "id": 4025864,
          "type": 4
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "performed_at": "21-04-2017 09:38:24 +0000",
      "ticket_id": 704,
      "performer_type": "user",
      "performer_id": 149018,
      "activity": {
        "shipping_address": "N/A",
        "shipment_date": "21 Apr, 2017",
        "category": "Phone",
        "contacted_customer": true,
        "issue_type": "Incident",
        "source": 3,
        "status": "Open",
        "priority": 4,
        "group": "refund",
        "agent_id": 149018,
        "requester": 145423,
        "product": "mobile"
      }
    }
  ]
}

If you wish to automate the process of the BI tool hitting the API URL you can do it by writing a custom code with the assistance of a developer. 

To receive an export for older ticket activities: 

Add the condition ?created_at=date when your BI hits the API URL. 

Make sure you enter the date in this format: YYYY-MM-DD.
Here is a sample link to get an export for 10th April:
<domain>.freshdesk.com/api/v2/export/ticket_activities?created_at=2017-04-10
Your file will be generated at the end of the day as per your account’s time zone, but the events will be stamped in UTC; as per your requirements, you'll want to convert it accordingly.

Note: You might notice some columns having values represented in numerical codes. Please refer to the table below to map the codes to the correct activity type: