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How to Create a Service Desk Dashboard in Looker with AI

Cody Schneider•

A great service desk doesn't just solve problems - it turns customer frustration into loyalty and provides critical insights that guide product improvements. The challenge is that all of this valuable data is often buried in ticket histories and performance logs, making it hard to see the big picture. This guide will walk you through planning and building a powerful service desk dashboard in Looker to bring clarity to your support operations.

Why a Service Desk Dashboard is a Game-Changer

Dumping ticket data into a spreadsheet is one thing, but visualizing it on a dashboard is what unlocks its true potential. Instead of manually exporting reports and trying to connect the dots, a well-designed dashboard gives you a live, interactive command center for your entire support team. Here’s what that really means for your business.

  • Eliminate Guesswork with Real-Time Data: See exactly what's happening right now, not what was happening last Tuesday when someone pulled a report. You can instantly track ticket inflows, agent workloads, and customer satisfaction without waiting for a manual update.

  • Spot Problems Before They Escalate: Rising ticket volumes for a specific issue? A sudden drop in customer satisfaction scores? A growing backlog that's about to breach your SLA (Service Level Agreement)? Dashboards make these trends immediately visible, so you can address root causes proactively instead of just reacting to consequences.

  • Boost Team Performance and Efficiency: By tracking agent-specific metrics like first-response time and tickets solved, you can identify top performers and see who might need extra coaching or support. It's not about micromanaging, it's about providing the tools and feedback your team needs to succeed.

  • Enhance the Customer Experience: Ultimately, every metric on the dashboard should lead back to one goal: making customers happier. By monitoring things like CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) and resolution time, you can ensure you’re delivering the fast, effective support that builds lasting relationships.

Planning Your Dashboard: The Foundation for Success

Jumping directly into Looker without a plan is a recipe for a cluttered, confusing dashboard that nobody on your team will use. Before you start building, take a few minutes to think through your strategy. A well-planned dashboard answers specific questions and serves a clear purpose.

1. Define Your Audience and Goals

First, ask yourself: Who is this dashboard for, and what do they need to know?

  • A support manager might need a high-level overview of team performance, SLA compliance, and backlog trends.

  • Individual support agents might want to see their own performance metrics, open tickets, and personal CSAT scores.

  • The Head of Product might not care about individual agent performance but will be interested in which product features are generating the most support tickets.

Trying to create one dashboard that serves everyone is almost impossible. It's often better to create a few tailored dashboards dedicated to specific audiences or goals. Your primary service desk dashboard should likely focus on the needs of the support managers and team leads who oversee the day-to-day operations.

2. Identify Your Key Support Metrics (KPIs)

Once you know your goals, you can choose the metrics that best measure progress toward them. Avoid the temptation to put every possible metric on your dashboard. Focus on the handful of data points that provide the most insight. Let's break them down by category.

Ticket Volume & Backlog Health

  • New Tickets Created: Tracks the inflow of support requests over time (daily, weekly). Helps with staffing and anticipating busy periods.

  • Tickets Solved: Shows the number of tickets your team is resolving. Comparing this to new tickets tells you if you're keeping up, falling behind, or getting ahead.

  • Ticket Backlog: The total number of unsolved tickets. This is a critical health metric - if it's constantly growing, something needs to change.

  • Tickets by Channel: Breaks down incoming tickets by source (email, chat, phone, social media) to help you allocate resources effectively.

  • Tickets by Type/Category: Highlights the most common issues customers are facing. Is it billing questions, technical bugs, or feature requests?

Team Performance & Efficiency

  • First Response Time (FRT): The average time it takes for an agent to send the first reply to a customer. This is a key driver of customer satisfaction.

  • Average Handle Time (AHT): The average time an agent spends actively working on a single ticket, from opening to resolution.

  • Full Resolution Time: The total time from when a ticket is created to when it’s fully resolved for the customer.

  • Tickets Resolved Per Agent: Measures individual agent productivity.

  • SLA Compliance Rate: The percentage of tickets that are responded to and resolved within your defined service level agreements.

Customer Experience

  • Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score: Typically a "How satisfied were you?" survey sent after a ticket is closed. It's the most direct measure of support quality.

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures overall customer loyalty by asking how likely they are to recommend your brand.

  • Customer Effort Score (CES): Gauges how easy it was for the customer to get their issue resolved.

Building Your Service Desk Dashboard in Looker (Step-by-Step)

Once your planning is done, it's time to build. Looker is a powerful BI tool, and while it has a learning curve, following these steps will help you bring your dashboard to life.

Step 1: Connect Your Data Source

Your support ticketing data probably lives in a platform like Zendesk, Jira Service Desk, HubSpot Service Hub, or Salesforce Service Cloud. The first step is to ensure that data is accessible to Looker. This is usually done by connecting Looker to the database where your application data is stored or a data warehouse where you've centralized it.

Step 2: Explore Your Data with "Explores"

In Looker, you don't query raw data tables directly. Instead, you use "Explores" - user-friendly starting points for analysis that are prepared by your data team. An Explore pre-joins relevant data tables (like tickets, users, and agents) into a logical view.

Select your Service Desk Explore. You'll see a list of "Dimensions" (the fields you can group by, like Ticket Creation Date, Agent Name, or Ticket Priority) and "Measures" (the values you can aggregate, like Count of Tickets or Average Response Time).

Step 3: Build Your Visualizations (Called "Looks")

A Look is a single data visualization - a chart, map, or table. You'll create one Look for each KPI you identified during the planning phase.

For example, to visualize New vs. Solved Tickets:

  1. From your Explore, select the Ticket Creation Date dimension and the Ticket Solved Date dimension. Filter for the last 30 days.

  2. Select the Count of Tickets measure.

  3. Under "Visualization," choose the Column chart type.

  4. Click "Run" to see the data, then "Save" to save it as a Look.

Repeat this process for your other KPIs, choosing the best visualization for each one:

  • Bar/Column Chart: Great for comparing values across categories (e.g., Tickets by Channel).

  • Line Chart: Ideal for showing trends over time (e.g., Ticket Backlog Over Time).

  • Single Value/Scorecard: Perfect for displaying a single, vital KPI (e.g., Overall CSAT Score, Current Backlog).

  • Table: Useful for detailed breakdowns (e.g., Agent performance table showing multiple metrics per agent).

Step 4: Combine Your Looks into a Dashboard

Now, you'll assemble all your individual Looks onto one canvas. Create a new dashboard and begin adding your saved Looks to it. As you add them, you can resize and reposition the tiles to create a logical flow. Think about how a manager would read it. Start with high-level summaries at the top (like CSAT and Backlog), then move into trend charts (New vs. Solved), and finally, to more detailed tables at the bottom.

Step 5: Add Filters to Make it Interactive

A static dashboard is useful, but an interactive one is invaluable. Add filters to your dashboard to allow users to slice and dice the data themselves. Common filters for a service desk dashboard include:

  • Date Range: Let users view data for Today, Past Week, Past Month, etc.

  • Channel: Filter to see performance just for Email or Chat support.

  • Team/Agent: Drill down to a specific support team or individual agent.

  • Priority: Isolate high-priority tickets to ensure they're being addressed promptly.

Connect these filters to the relevant charts on your dashboard. Now, your managers can answer their own follow-up questions without needing to request another report.

Final Thoughts

Building a well-structured service desk dashboard in Looker turns your raw support data into a clear narrative about your team’s performance and your customers' experience. It's an essential tool for scaling your support, spotting important trends, and empowering your team to deliver exceptional service based on facts, not guesswork.

It’s clear that building dashboards in powerful tools like Looker takes planning, technical know-how, and time to click through menus to find the right configurations. At a lot of companies, that process still involves hours of manual report building, which keeps you busy with data wrangling instead of acting on insights. At Graphed, we specialize in removing that friction. We believe you shouldn't have to become a data specialist just to understand your business performance. Link your data sources, and you can create complex, real-time dashboards across all your marketing, sales, and support platforms simply by describing what you want to see - no complex clicks or steep learning curves required.