Ticket Backlog and Ticket Volume: What the Two Numbers Tell You Together

“We came in on Monday to 207 open tickets. Two Mondays ago it was 96. My boss wants to know if we need to hire somebody, and honestly I do not know what to tell her.” Some version of that message lands with us over here at Maxdesk every few weeks, and for this page we have handed it to a made-up online shop selling school uniforms, in the last week of August, which for a shop like that is the worst week of the year by a distance. Whether 207 is a lot, and whether 96 was any good, comes down to a second number that most desks never put beside the first.

A ticket backlog is the pile of tickets sitting open and waiting on your team at a given moment, and ticket volume is how many new ones turn up over a day or a week. The backlog gets the attention, since it is the figure on the screen every morning. It is the volume, though, read against what the team managed to close over the very same stretch, that says whether a desk is catching up or slipping behind. We will work both of them through on the uniform shop’s week, with numbers that are invented but kept close to the sort of week a small desk actually has, give or take a bank holiday.

Why does 207 open tickets mean very little on its own

Take two desks sitting on the very same 207 open tickets this Monday morning. The first is the uniform shop, four people answering mail, and on an ordinary weekday the four of them close somewhere around 83 tickets between them. The second is a small software company with two people on the desk, closing about 25 on a good day and fewer when one of them gets pulled onto a customer call that runs over. Both of them see 207 when they log in.

Divide what is open by what the team closes on a normal day. The shop comes out at about two and a half working days of work and the software company at a little over 8. Plenty of desks call that figure days of backlog. It is about the most useful thing anybody can do with the count, mind you, since it gives the count something to be measured against. A customer writing to the shop that morning waits somewhere around two and a half days if the team works oldest first. The same customer writing to the software company waits more than a week. They go and tell you so, usually twice.

So when the shop’s owner asks whether 207 is a disaster, the plain reply is that it is a busy Monday and not a great deal more, not yet anyway, and certainly no reason to put a job advert up this week. What the count cannot tell anybody by its self is whether the pile is getting bigger from one week to the next, and for that you have to put what came in beside what went out. On an IT desk this sits nicely next to MTTR, which covers how long the fixing takes once somebody has picked a ticket up.

How do you tell if your backlog is actually growing

Picture a made-up week at the uniform shop in late August, starting on 96 open tickets on the Monday morning and finishing on 207 a week later. Most small desks that answer email will know the shape of it without being told. Monday arrives heavy. The weekdays roughly hold their own after that, and then the weekend goes and undoes the lot.

Start with Monday to Friday. Mail comes in at a little over 92 a day and the team closes a little over 83, so the pile grows by about 9 a day, which is real enough but slow, the sort of gap one good Tuesday clears. Saturday then brings 41 new tickets with one person doing a couple of hours in the morning, and Sunday another 37 with nobody on at all. Of the 111 extra tickets waiting on the second Monday, 66 arrived over the weekend. The weekday team was very nearly keeping up the whole time, funnily enough, and not one of them knew it, since the only number anybody looked at was the Monday one.

Which changes the hiring question altogether. The shop may well not need another full-time person all year round. What it more likely needs is somebody on Saturday and for a few hours of Sunday through the three weeks of the back-to-school rush, at a fraction of what a hire costs. You only find that out by setting what came in beside what went out a day at a time, rather than reading the open count on its own.

When does ticket volume jump, and can you see it coming

Most of the jumps are no surprise at all, to be honest with you. At the uniform shop the big one comes every year in the last fortnight of August and runs on into the first week of September, when parents order for the new term, find the blazer comes up small and write in about swapping it. A smaller one follows in January with the winter PE kits. Mondays get the weekend’s mail too. None of that ought to catch a desk out, and it does anyway, year after year, on account of nobody ever writing it down anywhere the desk would see it in time to do anything about it.

Then come the ones the business goes and makes for its self. A discount code in a newsletter that does not work on Shopify for the first hour brings in forty mails before lunch. A courier running 2 days late sends a wave of where-is-my-order mail the following morning, and Stripe declining a run of cards on a busy evening fills the inbox with parents wanting to know whether they were charged twice. Marketing generally knows about a sale a good long while before the desk does, mind you, and a line in Slack or Teams the day before saves the team a lost morning.

Your own year very likely has the same pattern sitting in it somewhere. What helps is keeping last year’s received numbers where you can get at them, so this August can be held up against the last one. Put the predictable weeks into the calendar the desk actually looks at as well. A recurring entry in Gmail or Outlook costs nothing. It sounds too basic to bother writing down. The uniform shop had never once done it until this year, truth be told.

What is actually sitting inside your backlog

Every ticket carries a status, open while it waits on your team and pending once the ball is with the customer, then resolved and closed after that, and the difference between the first two matters a great deal here. A ticket waiting for a customer to send a photo of the label is not waiting on you in the slightest. At the uniform shop 38 of the 207 were that sort, parents who had been asked for an order number or a picture and had not got round to it, so the backlog the team actually had that Monday was 169. Still a busy morning, but a good deal less frightening than the figure on the screen.

The count tells you nothing at all about age either, and the age of a ticket often matters more than how many there are. The oldest one open at the shop that morning was 11 days old. It was a refund waiting on the warehouse to confirm a returned jumper had come back before accounts would put it through in Xero, and it sat underneath two hundred newer mails that all looked more pressing. That one parent did not care in the least that the team had closed 429 tickets that week. Their money had been gone for 11 days, and as far as they were concerned that was the whole of it.

So we would look at the oldest ten every morning before anybody opens the new mail, and leave the rest of it for an hour. Ask of each one what it is waiting on. Most of the time it turns out to be somebody inside the business, the warehouse or the accounts person or a supplier, and the ticket its self is just where the delay happens to surface. At the shop, one message to the warehouse that morning cleared the refund along with four others stuck on the same returns shelf.

How do you bring a backlog down without burning out the team

Four Mondays running, the shop’s team came in to a queue longer than the one they had left on the Friday, and by the fourth of them the Saturday volunteer had quietly stopped volunteering. What turned it round was fairly ordinary, and nobody had to work through the night for it.

The uniform shop began by giving the first hour of every morning to the oldest tickets and nothing else, then went and looked at what the rush was actually made of. It was not very mysterious. Close to a third of the back-to-school mail was some version of which size should I order. The next biggest pile was how exchanges work, so one template for sizing and one knowledge base article on exchanges took a good bite out of the volume. The article went into the dispatch email as well, so a parent holding a blazer that came up small could find the answer before ever writing in, usually on the evening the parcel arrived. Those are tickets that never arrive, and over that one fortnight they very likely saved the team more hours than anything else they tried.

Then the extra hands. The owner took Saturday mornings for the three weeks, and the lad from the warehouse, who knows the exchange process better than anybody on the desk, answered exchange tickets on two afternoons a week. Neither of them is on the desk the rest of the year, and most of what they answered they could have done in their sleep. Help brought in for exactly as long as it is needed is the part most teams talk their own selves out of, nearly always on account of what an extra login would cost.

What the shop did not do was close tickets faster to bring the number down. A ticket shut after one hurried reply comes back the next day, and we went through why that flatters the figures while making the desk worse on our page about average handle time, AHT to most desks. The backlog dips for a day or so, then the reopened ones land back on top of it, and the customer has now written twice about the one thing and is a good deal crosser the second time.

A shrinking backlog is not always good news

By the third week of September the shop’s backlog was down to 40 and everybody was rather pleased with their own selves, and fair is fair, they had earned a good share of it. Some of the drop was the team’s work. A good part of it was simply the season ending, with volume back to around 50 a day, and a backlog falling because the mail stopped coming is not the same as one falling because the desk got better.

There is a less cheerful version too. A backlog will shrink when customers give up writing, having had no answer the last time and gone to the shop in town instead. Somebody on the desk who has gone and closed tickets after the first reply will shrink it as well. Both look lovely on a Monday morning. You only find out a few weeks later, one as reopened tickets and the other as customer satisfaction slipping, with the CSAT figure drifting down now and then and nobody quite able to say why the months went so quiet.

Turn it round and a growing backlog is not always bad news either. A shop that doubles its orders will watch the backlog grow with a team working beautifully. What matters then is whether the days of backlog hold steady, since a count going up while the days stay put means the business is growing and the desk is keeping pace with it. So we would never read the backlog without the reopens and the satisfaction score beside it. Nor would we chase it down to zero, since on most desks a backlog of nothing means more people answering than there is mail to answer, or mail that has dried up for a reason worth finding out.

Where does Maxdesk come into it

On the dashboard over here at Maxdesk you can see the open count and the unassigned count, along with the age of what is sitting open. Beside them sits a chart of tickets received against tickets resolved over the last 7 days, which is the uniform shop’s week drawn as two lines with nobody adding anything up by hand. That is the whole point of it. When the received line keeps sitting above the resolved one for days running, you see it long before Monday morning tells you.

Statuses do the sorting we went through further up, with pending tickets kept apart from the open ones, so the 38 parents who owe you a photo of a label stop padding the number that matters. Our automation rules can tap the owner of a ticket on the shoulder once it has sat quiet for more than a day, which is how an eleven-day refund gets noticed on day two. We would never set a rule to close a ticket just because time went by, mind you, so pending tickets wait until a person on the team has looked and decided they are done.

SLA targets are set by priority and honour your business hours, so a weekend nobody works does not count against the team. The SLA clock and the first response time, FRT for short, stay honest about the hours you actually keep. Templates and the knowledge base take the repeat questions. The Saturday cover from earlier needs no seat buying either, since the bill goes to the workspace rather than the person. The owner and the warehouse lad can both be on the desk for the three weeks and the bill stays exactly where it was.

Holding this August up against last August needs a year of history. A free workspace holds 3 months of it, counted from whenever each ticket last moved. Pro keeps 12 months and adds advanced reports and export to a CSV, so a year-on-year look at the rush is a Pro job, or a spreadsheet job if you have been keeping the numbers your own self.

What we do not do

Somebody planning next August’s rota will want a forecast of how much mail to expect and how many people that means. Maxdesk gives them neither. There is no staffing calculator in it and no workforce planning, so a big contact centre that lives on those should look elsewhere. We would rather say so here. Past the 7 days the dashboard chart covers, the longer view comes out through export on Pro. Email is the only thing we take in, so chat and phone calls sit outside the volume we count, and on a desk that also answers those the real ticket volume is bigger than anything Maxdesk shows. The free workspace carries ads for the people working in it as well, though never for your customers.

Where should you start this Friday

Every Friday at five, on a notepad or a sheet in Google Drive, write down four things. It takes two minutes. The tickets open and waiting on your team, leaving out the pending ones. How many came in that week, and how many the team resolved. Last of all, the age of the oldest open ticket, which you will have to go and find by hand the first time. After six Fridays you will know a good deal more about the backlog than the Monday number ever told you, and it will be there in your own handwriting whether the weekdays or the weekends are the ones falling behind.

If received keeps beating resolved for three or four weeks running, that is the time to talk about extra hands, and by then you should know which days they are needed on. A free workspace takes about a minute to set up if you would rather the dashboard did the Friday sums, though the notepad works perfectly well either way.

Common questions about ticket backlog and ticket volume

What is a ticket backlog?
A ticket backlog is the number of support tickets that are open and waiting on your team at a given moment. Tickets waiting on the customer (usually marked pending) are better left out, since your team cannot move them forward.

What is the difference between ticket backlog and ticket volume?
Ticket volume is how many new tickets arrive over a period, such as a day or a week. The backlog is how many are still open at a point in time. The backlog grows whenever volume is higher than the number of tickets your team resolves over the same period.

How do you calculate days of backlog?
Divide the number of open tickets waiting on your team by the number your team resolves on a normal day. 207 open tickets on a desk that resolves 83 a day is about 2.5 working days of backlog; the same 207 on a desk resolving 25 a day is more than 8.

What is a good ticket backlog size?
There is no single right number, because it depends on how many tickets your team resolves. As our own rule of thumb for an email desk, we would start worrying when the backlog passes about 3 working days of normal resolving, or when received tickets beat resolved tickets for three or four weeks running.

How do you reduce a ticket backlog?
Work the oldest tickets first for a set time each day, answer repeat questions with templates and knowledge base articles so fewer tickets arrive, add temporary help for predictable busy weeks, and avoid closing tickets early, since they come back as reopens.

Should pending tickets count in the backlog?
Usually not. A pending ticket is waiting on the customer, not on your team, so counting it makes the backlog look bigger than the work your team actually has. Track pending tickets separately and follow up on the old ones by hand.

Product details reviewed on 13 October 2026 against the live Maxdesk site. The uniform shop and its week of tickets are made up for the example.