Summarise Support Ticket Trends

What it does

Analyses the week’s Zendesk tickets using AI to identify emerging trends, common issues, and priority problems, generating an executive summary report for support leadership.

Why I recommend it

Individual tickets are trees, but managers need to see the forest. AI trend analysis surfaces patterns that manual review misses, enabling proactive problem-solving before issues escalate.

Expected benefits

  • Early detection of product issues
  • Data-driven support prioritisation
  • Better resource allocation
  • Proactive customer communication

How it works

Weekly trigger -> fetch all resolved tickets from past 7 days -> AI analyses for themes, common issues, sentiment patterns -> generate summary with top issues, volume trends, resolution time changes -> email to support leadership with actionable insights.

Quick start

Manually review last week’s tickets and group by common themes. Track time spent. Ask ChatGPT to analyse a sample of ticket summaries and generate trend report. Once format works, automate the weekly analysis.

Level-up version

Compare to previous weeks to identify growing vs declining issues. Include customer sentiment scores. Link to product roadmap items. Predict ticket volume for next week. Auto-create Jira tickets for product issues exceeding threshold.

Tools you can use

Support: Zendesk, Freshdesk, Help Scout, Intercom

AI: Claude API, ChatGPT API for analysis

Reporting: Google Docs, Slack for distribution

Analytics: Zendesk Explore for baseline data

Automation: Zapier, Make, n8n

Also works with

Support platforms: Front, Gorgias, HubSpot Service Hub

BI tools: Tableau, Looker for deeper analysis

Product: Jira, Linear for bug tracking

Technical implementation solution

  • No-code: Zapier weekly schedule -> Zendesk API fetch last 7 days tickets -> export to Google Sheets -> send summary to ChatGPT for trend analysis -> email formatted report.
  • API-based: Weekly cron -> Zendesk API query tickets by date -> extract subjects and descriptions -> Claude API analyse for trends with structured output -> generate markdown report -> email via SendGrid + post to Slack.

Where it gets tricky

Distinguishing signal from noise in ticket data, ensuring AI accurately identifies meaningful trends vs random variation, presenting insights actionably, and tracking whether identified trends actually get addressed.