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Customer service leaders often have access to more data than they know what to do with. Dashboards, charts, and metrics are everywhere—but clarity? That’s harder to come by.
Which metrics actually matter? And which reports give you the insight you need to improve service, support your team, and plan ahead?
In this guide, we break down six essential customer service reports that help teams uncover blind spots, reduce response times, and improve customer satisfaction. Whether you’re running a lean support operation or scaling a larger one, these are the reports you can’t afford to ignore.
What are customer service reports?
Customer service reports are structured summaries of key support metrics that help you track team performance and customer experience over time. They pull together data points like resolution time, ticket volume, CSAT scores, and SLA compliance into a format that’s easy to analyze and act on.
More than just dashboards, these reports help support leaders and operations teams spot patterns, prioritize improvements, and guide decision-making. With well-crafted reports, you can:
- Monitor agent workload and productivity
- Identify recurring issues or sudden spikes in customer queries
- Track progress toward team goals and service-level targets
What are the Benefits of Customer Service Reports?
Customer service reports turn raw support data into clear insights. Customer service reports help you track team performance, spot recurring issues, and improve customer satisfaction using real-time support data.
Here’s how they drive real impact:
1. Improve Team Performance
Reports help you spot bottlenecks and training gaps. For instance, if a particular channel (like chat) consistently shows slower response times, it may signal the need for more staffing or better workflows.
2. Assess the Quality of Service to Improve Customer Experience
Customer service reports help you understand how quickly your team responds and how effectively they resolve issues. By analyzing key metrics like CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), resolution time, and first contact resolution, you can pinpoint what’s working and where customers are getting stuck.
These reports surface friction points like long wait times, repeated complaints, and missed follow-ups, which directly impact customer experience. With these insights, you can refine internal workflows, coach agents where needed, and even update help center content to prevent future issues.
3. Track Tickets and Channel Usage
As customers use more channels to reach out (email, live chat, WhatsApp, social DMs) it becomes essential to understand where your support traffic is coming from. Channel-specific reporting helps you identify usage trends, optimize agent distribution, and ensure you’re not under- or over-staffing any particular touchpoint.
For example, if most escalations are coming through live chat during evenings, it’s a sign you need more experienced agents staffed during that window..
4. Discover Product Insights and Knowledge Gaps
Customer service reports don’t just tell you how your team is doing; they often reveal what your product or knowledge base is missing. A sudden rise in tickets tagged “billing error” or “can’t log in” points to areas of friction that need fixing, whether it’s a bug in the product or an outdated help article.
This kind of insight is gold for product managers and content teams, but it’s often buried in unstructured tickets. Reporting organizes that noise into a clear signal, making it easier to share actionable insights across teams and close the loop between support and product development.
6 customer service reports to track in 2025
1. Daily Volume of Customer Requests
This report shows how many customer queries your team receives daily—and through which channels (email, chat, phone, etc.).
Why it matters:
- Helps with staffing decisions
- Identifies peak support hours or days
- Reveals which channels may be under-/overutilized
📊 In Hiver: You can use the “New Conversations” report to track all incoming queries by date and channel.
💡Pro Tip: If you notice a spike in queries over the weekend, consider adjusting team schedules to avoid backlogs.
2. Requests Closed per Agent
This report tracks how many customer issues each agent resolves.
Why it matters:
- Gauges how effectively agents are managing their workload
- Identifies top performers who may be setting the bar for efficiency
- Surfaces workload imbalances, which—if left unchecked—can lead to burnout or inconsistent quality of services
Looking at closure numbers in isolation can be misleading, though. An agent who closes a large number of tickets might be resolving simpler issues, while others may be handling more complex ones. That’s why this report is best interpreted alongside other metrics like CSAT and Average Handle Time.
📊 In Hiver: You can view conversations closed per agent over time. For example, the report may show that ‘Abhinav’ closed 52 conversations last week—helping managers understand workload patterns and performance at a glance.
💡Pro Tip: If one agent is closing significantly more tickets than the rest, check whether they’re overburdened, using more efficient workflows, or simply taking on less complex issues. This insight can inform fairer task distribution and even surface best practices worth sharing across the team.
3. Average Response Time
Average Response Time is the average time your customer service agents take to respond to customer requests. It is calculated by dividing the total time taken to respond to requests by the total number of requests received.
Why it matters:
- A core driver of customer satisfaction and trust
- High response times can lead to frustration and churn
- Helps managers evaluate team bandwidth and identify slowdowns
If your average response time starts to climb, it may be a sign your team is stretched thin or bottlenecks exist in ticket routing.
📊 In Hiver: The Response Time Report breaks this down by agent, channel, and time frame. This allows managers to spot which areas need intervention quickly.
💡Pro Tip: Combine response time insights with ticket volume trends to understand if delays are due to high demand—or workflow inefficiencies. Automating request routing or adding self-service options can help reduce pressure on agents.
4. Average Handle Time
Average Handle Time (AHT) is the average amount of time a customer service agent spends actively handling a request. This includes the time on the call or chat, any hold time, and post-interaction tasks like documentation.
Why it matters:
- Longer handling times often indicate inefficiencies or knowledge gaps
- It’s closely tied to customer experience—no one likes waiting too long for answers
- Useful for workload planning and setting realistic SLAs
Let’s say a customer contacts a travel agency to change a flight. The agent begins the interaction at 10:00 AM and sends confirmation by 10:15 AM—that’s a 15-minute handle time. If similar requests start taking 30–45 minutes, you’ll want to investigate where delays occur.
💡Difference between Average Handle Time and Average Resolution Time
These two metrics may sound similar, but they measure different things:
- Average Resolution Time (ART) is the total time taken to resolve a customer issue—start to finish. This includes all back-and-forths, waiting periods, escalations, and agent hand-offs.
- Average Handle Time (AHT), on the other hand, refers to the total time an agent spends on a customer interaction. This includes the time spent talking or replying to the customer, plus any after-call or follow-up work. It’s useful for evaluating agent productivity.
5. First Contact Resolution
First Contact Resolution (FCR) measures the percentage of customer queries that are resolved in the very first reply—without any need for follow-ups or escalations.
Why it matters:
- It’s one of the strongest indicators of efficient and effective support
- High FCR rates often correlate with higher customer satisfaction and lower operational costs
- Reduces agent workload and shortens resolution cycles
Improving FCR starts with empowering your agents to deliver complete answers upfront. That includes giving them access to past conversations, contextual customer data, and clear internal documentation.
Strategies to improve FCR:
- Build a well-maintained internal knowledge base
- Use AI-powered tools like Hiver’s Copilot to instantly surface relevant customer information
- Train agents to anticipate likely follow-up questions and address them proactively in the first reply
Sample report showing First Contact Resolution on a daily basis
👉Case in point: Vacasa, a vacation rental company, used Hiver to automate email assignments and streamline internal collaboration. Instead of manually forwarding emails or sending side messages, agents simply tagged teammates and added notes. This allowed them to reduce turnaround time and resolve queries 80% faster.
6. Customer satisfaction score
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) measures how satisfied a customer is with a particular support interaction. Usually gathered via post-interaction surveys, it’s one of the clearest indicators of service quality.
Why this matters:
- Provides real-time feedback on agent performance and service quality
- According to Hiver’s latest benchmark report, 41% of support teams consider CSAT their most important KPI.
- Trends in CSAT can uncover deeper issues in processes, tools, or communication
📊 In Hiver: You can automatically send CSAT surveys after conversations and filter results by agent, team, tag, or channel. This lets you drill down to the root causes behind rising or falling scores.
💡Pro Tip: Don’t just collect CSAT scores—review the open-ended feedback alongside the numbers. Then, work cross-functionally with product and operations teams to fix the most common root causes. This creates a tighter feedback loop and improves both the customer journey and internal processes.
8 Best Practices to Create Better Customer Service Reports
To get real value from your reports, they need to highlight trends, spot issues early, and guide everyday decisions, and not just track data. The following best practices will help you do just that:
1. Tie Every Report to a Business Goal
A report is only useful if it helps you make a specific decision. So, before building a report, ask yourself: what problem are we trying to solve?
If you’re trying to reduce response times, focus on metrics like SLA performance and first response time. If your goal is to improve customer satisfaction, track CSAT trends, resolution time, and reopen rates. Reports that connect directly to business goals are far more likely to drive real improvements.
💡Pro Tip: Before you build any report, write down the exact question you want it to answer, like “Why is our CSAT dropping this month?” Then build only around that.
2. Segment and Filter to Find Real Insights
Aggregated data can only tell you so much. The real value of reporting emerges when you break data down by specific categories like channel, time of day, team, customer segment, or issue type. For instance, SLA breaches might seem under control until you filter by shift and realize they spike after 6 PM. These hidden patterns are what turn a report into a strategic asset.
💡Pro Tip: In Hiver, you can filter reports by agent, channel, tag, SLA policy, or even ticket status. This makes it easier to zoom in on performance gaps like delayed responses on a specific shift or channel without drowning in averages.
3. Keep Reports Focused, Visual, and Digestible
Too much data in a single view leads to confusion. Focus each report on a single area, like agent performance, ticket trends, or customer satisfaction. Choose only the most relevant 3–5 metrics and present them in a clean, visual format (charts, graphs, or callout stats). This improves readability and ensures the audience can act on the data quickly.
💡Pro Tip: Limit each report to five metrics or fewer. If you can’t explain the value of each one in a sentence, it probably doesn’t need to be there.
4. Tailor Reports to the Right Audience
Different people need different kinds of reports. A support manager might want detailed numbers like how many tickets each agent handled, or where SLA targets were missed. But someone in leadership, like a CX head or VP, usually wants the big picture, such as trends, customer satisfaction, and potential risks.
For example, if your CSAT score dropped this month:
- The manager’s report could show which agents got low ratings and which issues caused the drop.
- The VP’s report might focus on how CSAT is changing over time and if it’s affecting customer retention.
When reports are tailored to what the reader needs, they’re easier to understand and more useful for making decisions.
5. Review Reports on a Set Cadence
Looking at reports only when there’s a problem leads to rushed decisions. Instead, make reporting a regular habit. Weekly reviews can help you catch issues early, while monthly reviews are great for planning and strategy. Checking reports regularly builds accountability and helps your team stay on track.
💡Pro Tip: Set a repeating calendar reminder to review key reports with your team. Keep it short, maybe just 15 minutes. Ask three simple questions: What changed? Why did it happen? What should we do next?
6. Use Reports to Improve People, Not Just Processes
Reporting shouldn’t just be about operational KPIs; it should also support your team’s growth. When performance metrics are used in coaching conversations, they give agents clarity on where they stand and how to improve. Celebrate high performers, offer support where needed, and use the data to build a feedback-rich environment.
7. Automate the Busywork, Focus on the Insights
Manually pulling data from spreadsheets or multiple inboxes wastes valuable time and increases the chance of errors. The right reporting and analytics tool can help you automate data collection, provide real-time visibility, and free your team to focus on interpreting insights.
With Hiver, for example, you get reports on SLA performance, CSAT scores, and conversation trends, all updated in real time. You can filter SLA data by SLA policy, assignee, ticket status, tags, type, and violation status, making it easier to analyze specific delays, monitor team performance, or investigate recurring SLA breaches.
8. Log Takeaways from Each Report
Data alone doesn’t drive improvement; reflection does. After reviewing a report, it’s important to capture what the data is telling you and how your team plans to act on it. This could include trends you’ve identified, anomalies worth watching, or next steps like shifting agent schedules or updating help center content.
You create a running history of decisions and learnings by consistently logging insights and follow-up actions at the end of each report. This improves accountability and helps when reviewing performance over time or reporting to leadership.
💡Pro Tip: Add a final section to every report titled “Insights & Actions,” and list 2–3 bullet points: one observation, one short-term fix, and one long-term consideration. Treat it like a decision journal.
Examples of Companies Using Customer Service Reports to Improve Support Operations
1. Cohere Health
Cohere Health, a healthcare technology provider, was handling growing volumes of client emails without visibility into workloads or response performance. By setting up a custom dashboard in Hiver, they tracked first response time, resolution time, escalations, and tag trends directly from Gmail. As a result, they gained clarity on high-volume issue types and team capacity, allowing for proactive adjustments and smoother client support.
“We track first response time, resolution time, and escalations…filter insights by tags. This gives us a good gauge on what types of issues we’re having based on payer partners.”
2. New Hope Fertility Center
At New Hope Fertility Center, patient email volume was leading to duplicate efforts and missed follow-ups. After implementing Hiver’s collision alert and collaboration tools, they prevented nearly 400 duplicate email responses per month, saving roughly 33 hours monthly. Additionally, using internal notes streamlined teamwork across three units, adding around 800 notes per month and saving 27 hours. Combined, staff efficiency rose by an impressive 50%.
Since we started using Hiver, I’ve seen a huge uptick in the efficiency levels of our staff. Since our staff realize that their performance is tracked and quantified, they’ve started working a lot harder. In fact, we’ve also seen a significant drop in the number of complaints from patients.
Jennifer Nguyen
Operations Associate, New Hope Fertility Center
3. Visiting Angels
Visiting Angels, a home care franchise network, was struggling to manage and respond to caregiver and client emails efficiently. Using Hiver’s tag-based analytics and mobile inbox access helped them identify and eliminate bottlenecks in caregiver requests. This resulted in a 100% increase in productivity, doubling their capacity to coordinate client support across teams.
“I don’t know what we were doing before because it wasn’t good enough, but Hiver has completely re-invented our communication and efficiency.”
Luke Thompson
Co-owner, Visiting Angels – Wisconsin
Reporting With Hiver: Go Beyond the Basics
In order to rigorously track such reports, you need a customer service platform. That’s where Hiver can help.
It’s a customer service platform designed to feel as intuitive as your everyday inbox. It combines familiar email-like usability with powerful collaboration, automation, and reporting features tailored for support teams.
Here’s a breakdown of reporting capabilities in Hiver:
1. Conversation Reports
Conversation Reports in Hiver help you understand how effectively your team is managing customer conversations. With the help of these reports, you can understand the number of conversations that have taken place, how quickly your team responds to queries, and the average time they take to resolve these queries.
2. User Reports
Keep track of every support agent’s performance and workload. Find out their average response and resolution times, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) ratings, and much more. With the help of Hiver’s User Reports, you can identify top performers and those who might need training or assistance.
3. Tag Reports
Tag Reports in Hiver help you identify trends and recurring issues across customer conversations. For instance, you can track the number of open or pending conversations tagged as ‘high priority’—making it easier to spot bottlenecks, escalate issues early, and allocate resources where they’re most needed.
4. Custom Reports
Custom Reports in Hiver give you the flexibility to go beyond default metrics. You can build tailored dashboards by applying filters across tags, statuses, time periods, or team members—so you’re always looking at the data that matters most.
Below is a custom report showing the number of new conversations assigned to a support team from March 16th to April 14th, tagged as ‘L1-Chat.’ This level of granularity can help you understand conversation trends at a much deeper level. For instance, if there’s a sudden spike in L1-Chat tickets during a specific week, you can investigate what triggered it—be it a product bug, a marketing campaign, or a seasonal surge.
Data Is Useless Unless You Act on It
The true value of reporting comes when you consistently turn numbers into insights and insights into actions. Whether it’s identifying a training gap, improving first response times, or spotting recurring product issues, good reporting keeps your support operation proactive, not reactive.
And having the right tools makes all the difference.
Hiver makes it simple to access real-time, contextual reports without leaving your inbox. There is no juggling spreadsheets or chasing down data—just clear visibility and faster follow-through.
Start by acting on your reports and not just reviewing them. That’s how good support teams become great ones.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. What should a customer service report include?
A customer service report should include metrics such as first response time, resolution time, CSAT scores, SLA compliance, and ticket volume. It may also feature agent performance data, tag trends, and insights to help improve customer experience and support operations.
2. How do I create a customer service report?
To create a customer service report, start by defining your reporting goal. Then select relevant metrics, gather data from your support tool, segment it by time or category, and present it using charts or summaries. Tools like Hiver can automate much of this process.
3. What are the most important metrics in customer service reporting?
The most important customer service metrics include first response time, resolution time, CSAT score, SLA adherence, ticket backlog, and reopen rate. These metrics help assess both the efficiency of the support team and the quality of customer experience.
Get Insightful Customer Service Reports in Hiver
- See how your team is performing at a glance
- Track key metrics like response time and resolution rates
- Use insights to make smarter support decisions
