How We Integrated Zoho and Grafana to Propel Our Team to Greatness 🚀
Have you ever been a part of a hardworking team that, despite their efforts, ends up shouldering blame? If yes, our situation in operations might resonate with you. On any given day, our Zoho Desk is inundated with approximately 300 tickets, each falling under various classifications and priorities. Many of these tickets are complex and time-consuming to resolve, causing them to carry over to the next day and become overdue.
The challenge we face is the lack of visibility into critical metrics. Questions like the total number of tickets created, the various classifications in use, the resource who close the most tickets, and pending tickets are difficult to answer definitively. Convincing others about the work overload has proven to be quite a task.
While Zoho Desk does offer predefined dashboards and customization options, our workflow relies heavily on custom fields. Additionally, the platform lacks real-time monitoring capabilities.
If you’ve followed along this far, you may find yourself in a similar scenario or be seeking solutions for building real-time monitoring functionality within Zoho Desk. Keep reading!
Challenges
As a team, we set out to tackle these challenges head-on, with the ultimate goal of maximising throughput and efficiency to ensure customer satisfaction. Here are the key challenges we identified on our team board:
1. Large Team Management:
With a growing client base, our team size has expanded proportionally. Managing a larger team is becoming increasingly challenging without access to key metrics.
2. Ticket Assignment Automation: Currently, our ticket assignment process involves agents or team members manually assigning tickets from a common email account. Some agents assign tickets to themselves, while others choose to assign them to the next team member. This variation in assignment might be due to differences in ticket complexity, with some opting for the low-hanging fruit.
3. Timely Escalation: To maintain SLA compliance, we required a solution which will escalate the tickets to a manager when there is breach in a predefined time threshold (e.g., x minutes/hours).
4. Email Tickets with Mandatory Fields: Zoho Desk offers a convenient feature that allows users to raise tickets via email. However, this feature creates tickets without mandatory fields, such as client or environment name. This calls for communicating the team over and over again resulting in time consumption.
5. Real-Time Monitoring & Scoreboard: The absence of a real-time dashboard has caused inefficiencies in tracking productivity.
Improving Daily work is even more important than doing daily work. — The Phoenix Project
Solutions
I have slept on these challenges for a day and explored the Zoho documentation along with some Google search. It seemed like I could solve some of these issues using zoho’s features, while others might require development.
Real-Time Monitoring & Scoreboard
Zoho analytics with additional license offers Dashboard experience but I needed something more interesting like a real-time dashboard to proactively act on tickets which does not require additional license.
So I came up with a solution which is powered by Grafana Dashboard and projected it on a monitor. For that, I used zoho web hook, instead of polling ticket meta details from Zoho desk.
The Web hook listener is developed using a simple java script. The json payload received will be deserialised and stored in a relational database like SQL Server.
Then I created a Grafana Dashboard to pull the details from the database.
Architecture Diagram
Final Results
By incorporating real-time monitoring for Zoho tickets, my team’s productivity and efficiency increased tenfold. This enhancement not only bolstered accountability but also motivated everyone to aim higher and soar!
A great team doesn’t mean that they had the smartest people. What made those teams great is that everyone trusted one another. It can be a powerful thing when that magic dynamic exists. — The Phoenix Project
