Delivering prompt customer support is a must for businesses that want to provide great CX. But when support requests start piling up, it can be a tall order. This is called a ticket backlog—any time period with a significant number of unresolved tickets.

This problem is fairly normal. In fact, ticket backlogs are one of the eight common customer service challenges that SaaS companies face. Luckily, there are ways to prevent and address it.

Let’s take a look at how to identify a backlog in your ticketing system and how you can speed up the customer support process in six easy steps.

What is a ticket backlog in customer support?

A ticket backlog refers to the number of support tickets that haven’t been addressed within the target response time outlined in your customer support strategy or service level agreement (SLA). 

This could be the result of a sudden increase in ticket volume due to peak season, a sale, press coverage, or an influx of new questions about a feature release. 

Ticket backlogs can also be caused by temporary staffing issues, like team members calling out sick, or unexpected product events like a major outage or product recall. 

It could also mean you don’t have enough customer support agents to handle tickets, or you need to further optimize your workflow for effectively resolving customer issues.

How do you measure your ticket backlog volume?

The best way to measure your ticket backlog depends on your customer support strategy. If your SLA outlines a 24-hour response time, then your ticket backlog would refer to the number of tickets that don’t receive responses 24 hours after they were sent.

Using this policy, if 50 out of 500 tickets are still unanswered after 24 hours, then your backlog is 10% of your total ticket volume. If your SLA outlines a longer response time you can adjust your method for measuring your ticket backlog accordingly.

Note: When calculating your ticket backlog, it’s important to distinguish between unanswered tickets and unresolved tickets. 

A backlog of unanswered tickets suggests that you may be understaffed, while a backlog of unresolved tickets may indicate issues with your training programs or escalation management process.

Another option is to measure your ticket backlog for each service tier and monitor the average age of your open tickets. 

• Do Tier 1 tickets have a consistently faster resolution time than Tier 3 tickets? 
• Are the majority of open tickets in your ticket queue more than 30 days old? 

If so, the ticket backlog is more likely due to the difficulty of customer issues, not to an increased number of tickets arriving at your service desk.

What’s wrong with a ticket backlog?

Before we go any further, it’s important to mention that ticket backlogs aren’t all bad. 

In fact, a ticket backlog of 5-10%, rather than 0%, shows your customer support team is comfortably busy. If they resolve all new tickets at the end of each day, it may be a sign that you’re overstaffed.

Having a small but manageable ticket backlog means there’s a steady stream of tickets in the queue, and your team members are comfortable with ticket prioritization and dependencies.

Once your ticket backlog climbs past 10% or 20%, it can start to have a negative impact on your business in several ways:

• As average response times lengthen, you may see a rise in unhappy customers and a decrease in customer satisfaction and other customer service KPIs.
• Customers may submit multiple tickets or reach out on multiple support channels in the hopes of prompting a faster response.
• Your support team may start rushing to keep up with the tickets, resulting in overworked associates spending less time on each customer issue.
• You may be unable to resolve tickets within the timeframe outlined in your SLA, causing issues with clients or business partners.

The good news is that these outcomes are avoidable. With a little planning, you can take charge of a ticket backlog and get it under control.

6 ways to reduce your ticket backlog

The best time to address a ticket backlog is to prevent it from becoming an issue. As you start to notice your ticket numbers creeping up, implement these six help desk strategies:

1. Use a system for prioritizing tickets

Ticket prioritization (or ticket triage) refers to the order in which tickets are addressed. You might choose to prioritize tickets based on the importance of the issue, with urgent requests going to the top of the queue. 

Or, you might prioritize them based on subscription levels, with paying customers taking priority over free tier tickets.

Prioritization can help prevent more follow-up tickets, such as when a business customer is troubleshooting an issue that affects their entire company. 

It can help you resolve tickets before they become more serious, and respond to your most-valued customers first.

2. Provide more self-service options

One way to address a ticket backlog is to reduce the volume of incoming tickets. Build your self-service options so that customers can resolve simple issues on their own.

Self-service tools can take the form of a knowledge base with tutorials and answers to frequently asked questions, or an interactive chatbot that tries to solve the customer’s problem before routing the request to a live agent.

Make sure to update your knowledge base as soon as you release a new feature or product update so customers can quickly learn how to resolve new issues on their own.

3. Develop canned responses

Crafting every response from scratch can take time, so create a library of pre-written responses and answers to frequently asked questions. However, make sure your associates still come across as personable and warm.

AI-powered support tools can provide email templates or just-in-time reply text for associates to choose from, reducing the time it takes to analyze a ticket and craft a response. 

Your customer support associates can choose the most relevant response for each ticket, while maintaining a consistent brand voice across customer support channels.

4. Follow up on unresolved tickets

Some tickets require more information from the customer, but the customer never responds to confirm whether a solution has worked. 

This is especially common with chatbots and live chat channels, where it’s easy for a customer to get disconnected and fail to return to the chat.

With automation tools, you can follow up on these cases quickly. Simply direct your software to send a follow-up notification reminding the customer that the ticket is still open and awaiting a response. 

After two attempts, mark the ticket as resolved and remove it from your queue.

This kind of automation can help to reduce your ticket backlog without any additional effort on the part of your associates.

5. Schedule a dedicated work session

If your ticket backlog is getting out of hand, set a time for all of your team members to come together and clear as many tickets as possible. 

With everyone pitching in, you can escalate the most complex tickets and batch similar tickets together and reduce your backlog.

You can make this a weekly routine, or schedule it on an as-needed basis. The most important thing is to have team members from multiple support tiers available so you don’t have to wait for responses for more complex issues.

6. Leverage AI and augmented support services

When your ticket backlog keeps growing, you need more than just more people—you need a smarter, more scalable solution. That’s where AI-powered automation combined with human expertise can make a real difference.

Using an Augmented AI model (like we do with Crescendo and PartnerHero), you can drastically reduce your ticket backlog without sacrificing quality or customer satisfaction.

Here’s how it works:

• AI handles repetitive, high-volume tasks: Crescendo AI automatically manages simple, common support tickets—things like password resets, order status updates, and basic troubleshooting—freeing your team from getting bogged down by easy-to-solve issues.
• Human-in-the-loop for complex tickets: PartnerHero’s dedicated support agents step in when the AI flags tickets as complex, sensitive, or requiring brand-specific knowledge. That way, your internal team only handles the highest-priority cases that truly need their attention.
• Real-time ticket triage and escalation: The system uses smart triage to route issues to the right resource immediately, keeping your backlog from ballooning.
• Continuous improvement: As the AI works, it learns from escalated cases and feedback, making it even more effective over time—without needing your internal team to retrain it manually.

The result? Faster ticket resolution times, a lighter load for your agents, and a consistently excellent experience for your customers. 

Plus, because our Augmented AI solution blends automation with human oversight, you maintain the quality, empathy, and brand voice your customers expect.

Reduce your ticket backlog the smart way

Your team can get a customer support ticket backlog due to any number of issues, from insufficient self-service options to an inefficient system for ticket prioritization. 

But often, it’s simply a matter of not having enough hands on deck to keep up with the inflow of new tickets.

By combining smart ticket prioritization, expanding self-service options, using automation, and leveraging AI-powered solutions, you can manage support volumes more efficiently—and even stay ahead of future spikes.

Ready to see how AI can help you get ahead of your backlog? Talk to our team to learn more about PartnerHero + Crescendo’s Augmented AI solution—and start scaling smarter, not harder.