Reporting on users and organisations

Two attributes look like the customer's organisation and mean different things. Which one you pick decides what last year's figures say.

Two attributes look like the customer's organisation and mean different things. Which one you pick decides what last year's figures say.

Build one

1. Open a report on the ticket dataset.
2. Group by Ticket organization name, or by requester.
3. Add a metric: tickets, or a time measure.
4. Filter to a period.

Ticket organisation or requester organisation

Ticket organization name is the organisation on the ticket itself. Requester organization name is the requester's current default organisation. They agree until somebody moves between organisations, and then the second one quietly rewrites history: every old ticket of theirs reports under where they work now.

For account reporting, group on the ticket's organisation. Use the requester's when the question is genuinely about people rather than about tickets.

Both come with a family of attributes you can filter on: ID, domains, external ID, status and tags. Requester organization domains is the one that lets you group customers by their domain without writing anything.

What breaks the breakdown

Unassigned users. Every customer not linked to an organisation falls outside it. Where a third of your users have no organisation, an organisation report describes two thirds of reality without saying so. Check that number before you read anything else.

Grouping by individual customer. Thousands of requesters means thousands of rows and a report that truncates. Filter to a segment, or group by organisation, and keep individual detail for a specific question.

Reading it well

Organisation reporting is the useful one: which customers generate the most contact, where times are worst, who is escalating. That is account management information and it usually exists nowhere else.

Volume is not value

The customer raising most tickets may be your largest account using the service properly, or a small one struggling. Volume next to their size or spend is the comparison that means something.

Custom fields on organisations are the good ones

Segment, plan, region, account manager. They are maintained deliberately rather than filled in under time pressure, which makes them more reliable than most ticket fields.

Watch what this reveals

Reports naming individual customers get shared. Decide who should see them before putting one on a dashboard several teams can open.

See also

• Reporting on custom fields
• Can I report on the email domain of users
• Managing access to Explore