Each support request that landed in our inbox was triaged and tagged with at least one category. But looking at them as a whole, it wasn’t obvious what was hurting our customers most. The only measurement available was tag count. So priority went to whichever category was loudest that month or week, or to a concern raised by a couple of very frustrated customers trying to accomplish a specific task.
I decided to leave the tagging process as it was. Instead, I built something small that grouped requests by the pain underneath them rather than the tag on top. Tickets describing the same problem in different words were treated as one problem. The tool exposed more dimensions for ranking, comparing, and understanding support requests.
After a few iterations, I ended up with this scoring card (from 1 to 5):
- Do we understand what the user is trying to do?
- How severe is the pain?
- Can we see exactly what customers were doing right before asking for help?
- Are customers failing because they can’t find something, or the UI/UX is unclear?
- Are customers asking for things we already support?
- Where does our application design or policies contradict customer expectations?
- What is the dominant emotion in these requests?
- Are customers writing because of urgent/time-sensitive stakes?
- What is the overall pain score for this topic?
I was after clarity, not perfect accuracy. This is a starting point for further investigation.
The output was a monthly report that read like an answer instead of a spreadsheet.
# Account Access Support Tickets - Scorecard Report Analysis Date: December 1, 2025 Total Tickets Analyzed: 161 Tag Filter: Account Access ## How severe is the pain? Score: 4/5 - Mostly blocking Rationale: - 55% blocking (high severity) - cannot access account, preventing all account activities - 35% high friction (medium severity) - can access but with significant workarounds - 10% inconvenience (low severity) - minor questions Evidence: - "I'm unable to login" (blocking) - "I cannot access account to renew" (blocking) - "I need to change email but can't reset password" (high friction) ...
That one page replaced hours of scrolling. Instead of scanning 161 requests and hoping a pattern surfaced, we could open the report and see that account access was blocking most of the people it touched, with the customers’ own sentences quoted as evidence.
It changed how we decided what to build. Support and product started looking at the same picture. Prioritization stopped being an argument about who felt most strongly and became a question about what the numbers showed.
There’s still room to improve how those signals get captured and read over time, and I’d like anyone in the company to be able to generate a report without asking me. But the core shift already happened: the support queue went from a thing we survived to a thing we learned from.