How to display support tickets on an office TV

Support teams live in a constant low-grade tension: how big is the queue right now, and is it growing faster than we can resolve? The team knows. The founder usually doesn’t, until Monday’s report. Meanwhile customers are getting slower responses than anyone realizes.

Putting a live support-ticket counter on a TV fixes the asymmetry in about ten minutes.

What to display

The most useful single counter is open tickets right now — the current size of the queue. It reflects the team’s ability to keep up, not just how many tickets arrived.

Secondary counters worth running:

Tickets resolved today — rewards throughput
Tickets awaiting response > 1 hour — surfaces SLA pressure
First-response time (running average) — rewards speed
CSAT last 50 tickets — shows quality

If you’re going to pick one, pick “open tickets right now”. It’s the most action-inducing.

Source: your ticketing tool

Every major support tool has either a native webhook or a Zapier integration:

Zendesk: native webhooks on ticket-created, ticket-solved
Intercom: webhooks API with conversation events
Freshdesk: “Observer” rules can fire outbound webhooks
Front: webhook events for conversation lifecycle
Help Scout: native webhooks for conversation events
HubSpot Service Hub: workflow webhooks

Setup

Create a counter. For “open tickets right now”, you need an incrementing counter on ticket-created and a decrementing counter on ticket-solved. Most tools let you configure this as a delta counter.
Connect your ticketing tool. OAuth where available; webhook URL otherwise.
Subscribe to both events: ticket.created and ticket.solved (or each tool’s equivalent).
Pair a TV with the broadcasting tool.

The SLA color-code trick

The single most useful addition: color the counter by queue size. Green when it’s below your SLA target, yellow in the warning zone, red when it’s breaching. Most broadcasting tools let you configure thresholds.

Example: if your SLA is “response within 1 hour” and you have 5 agents averaging 12 minutes per ticket, anything over 25 tickets in queue is starting to breach. Set yellow at 20, red at 25. The TV goes red when the queue is at risk.

When the TV goes red, every manager walking past notices. The queue tends to shrink within 20 minutes.

The warning

A support ticket TV can swing team morale hard. On great days it’s motivating. On bad days — queue growing, SLA breached, CSAT dropping — it can feel punishing. Some teams run the TV during business hours only and blank it at night. Others keep it up 24/7 as accountability.

One heuristic: if the team has agency to fix the queue (they’re the right size, they have the tools), keep the TV up. If the queue is growing because of understaffing or a tooling problem, the TV just broadcasts management failure. Fix the root cause first; the TV amplifies whatever reality already is.

Multi-channel setups

If you do support across multiple channels — email, chat, Twitter, Instagram DMs — either run one counter per channel (surface where the pressure is) or combine into one “open tickets” counter (total pressure). Most teams prefer the former because it tells them where to send help.

CSAT and quality

For the quality side, a counter showing the rolling 50-ticket CSAT score is valuable. Gamifies careful work over speed. Pair a CSAT counter with the “tickets resolved” counter to make sure the team optimizes for both quality and throughput.

Start here

One counter. Open tickets right now. Live on a TV. The team’s behavior will change within a week. Start the free trial and wire up your ticketing tool. If you’re already running a broadcasting tool, adding a support-tickets counter usually takes 15 minutes.