Build the Product Your Users Want

Why Tag?
Tagging support tickets helps you improve the experience for your users over time. It all comes back to the customer. It also helps you improve how your teams work.
Tagging enables you to say “22% of the questions we get are about problems with setting up billing” instead of “we really get a lot of questions about billing”. It also helps you check those gut feelings and makes sure you and the rest of the team spends time on what are the most important issues.
It help you identify problems with the product to highlight to the product team with the relevant examples for them to understand how to improve the product.
It helps you find questions that need a new or updates help article in your knowledge base.
It shows you how things change over time and where your time went.
Getting a solid process up and running for tagging your support tickets and for getting the insights to the right people takes some time and investment. But it is worth it.

What does tagging mean?
“Tagging” means categorizing your tickets. Instead of having two piles of tickets, unanswered and answered, you can break those tickets down into other categories. You decide which categories are most relevant for your users, product, and team. A category is a certain type of question that you want to track, analyze or share with others.
Technically tagging means adding some sort of metadata to your support tickets. Most email support tools have some variation of tagging built in and usually also allows at least some basic reporting based on the tags.

Which tags do people use?
There are different approaches to tagging and very different levels of granularity. From a handful to hundreds of tags. Some fo the common ones are tags for bugs, feature requests, high level question categories (e.g. “login”, “billing”, “reports”), and questions that need a new help article.
The top tip is to start simple with just a few tags (or even just one) and let the structure develop over time.

How to share the insights?
Again different teams use different approaches. Some create weekly or monthly reports on all support conversations and how they were tagged to see things like what the biggest categories of questions were or how some categories grew or shrank since the last time period. A Friday update to the support team, product team, or the whole company is often a good way to start.

Which tools to use?
Most support systems have tagging built in and some also have reporting systems that help you create the reports you need. Some teams also use a spreadsheet or similar to keep track of the tags used as a reference for the team. That is often the case in larger teams that use in the order of 50 or 100 tags.

What does the process look like?
First you need to start tagging. To do that you need to decide what you want to tag and why. Do you want to track the question you get the most? Or bug reports? Or issues that require a new help article? Whichever one it is, think about how the output will be used, and pick a name for the tag.
Next you need to do the tagging. If you’re the whole support team this one is straightforward. You just use the tag you decided on whenever you come across the a relevant support ticket. If you have a larger team it will take a little more work. Do you want everyone who works in support to tag tickets as they are answering them? You need to let them know then. And you may need to keep reminding them that they need to tag things for the first few weeks. Share the report with them and prompt them to say “I forgot to tag”!
Finally you need to share what you have found with the right people. If those are your product team, then you count how many times the tag was used this week, you may want to copy a couple of the emails as examples, and you include any take-aways or suggestions you have based on the data and email examples.