Slack thread chaos got me counting messages per ticket

Read a post last Friday where someone tracked 14 Slack messages for every support ticket their team closed, and that number stuck with me all week. I checked our own workspace and saw similar noise, so now I'm tagging each ticket with a message count just to see if it changes how much we type before solving. Has anyone else tried cutting down internal chatter like this, or is that just how your ops run?

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ryanm601mo ago

Tracked message counts for two weeks a while back and it changed how my team works for real. We found that most of our chatter was just people re-asking the same questions, so we started writing a quick summary in the ticket before we ever ping anyone. That alone cut our internal messages by half, maybe more. We also made a rule to wait five minutes before replying in Slack if the answer wasn't urgent, and a lot of stuff just resolved itself. The count is still there in our tags but nobody looks at it anymore, we just got better at typing less. Honestly it's worth trying even for a week, just to see where your time actually goes.

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alicemurphy1mo ago

13 Slack messages per ticket sounds like a support team solving problems via interpretive dance, so good on you for actually measuring it. @ryanm60 nailed it though, most of that noise is just people asking the same thing twice because nobody read the first answer. I tried the five minute rule and my Slack went from a firehose to a dripping faucet, which is still annoying but way less stressful. Just don't get too attached to the count, because once your team learns to type less, the number becomes a weird trophy nobody knows what to do with.

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