Question
Why do I see discrepancies between Insights and Explore?
Answer
There are several reasons why you may see slightly different numbers in Insights and Explore. The most common reasons are:
- Time zones. Explore uses the user profile time zone, but Insights uses the account's default time zone. For further details, see the articles: Which time zone does Explore use? and Which time zone does Insights use?
- Synchronization times. In Insights, data syncs every 24 hours for Support Professional plans, and one hour after the last sync ended for Enterprise plans. In Explore, data syncs according to your Explore plan. For more information, see the article: How frequently does my Zendesk data sync to Explore?
- Date ranges used. Equivalent Explore and Insights queries and metrics might be filtered by slightly different time ranges. For example, the default "Ticket created - Last 7 days" Explore metric looks at the last seven days starting from yesterday. This ensures that it always returns data for seven full days. In Insights, a similar metric looks at the seven days starting from today.
- Backlog dataset date. In Insights, the backlog data is collected once a day at the last data sync of the day and is shown as the backlog for the next day. In Explore, the backlog data synchs according to your Explore plan (see the article: When is my Support ticket backlog data available in Explore?). When comparing backlog data by date, you will see that dates in Insights are shifted forward by one day compared to Explore.
- Field value changes reporting. Each ticket update consists of multiple field changes that are submitted by agents or automated by the system. Explore records only one field change per update per field but Insights records all changes of the field, which is normally not necessary. For example, a ticket status was changed from pending to solved by the agent, and during the same update, a trigger changed the status to open. In Insights this ticket is considered as reopened because one of the status changes was solved to open. However, in Explore this ticket doesn't count towards the Tickets reopened metric because the solved status was an intermediary change that was corrected by the trigger.
- Ticket updates metric. In Explore, the Updates metric located in the Ticket updates dataset is returning all updates submitted in a ticket. However, in Insights the Ticket updates metric returns only those updates during which at least one ticket field value was changed.
8 Comments
Are there any other common reasons why there might be discrepancies other than the above suggestions?
E.g. I'm looking at satisfaction scores (%) and there seems to be a small % discrepancy between the two reporting, even though the Metrics and the Attributes that are being used for each reports are the same (simply the % satisfaction score, with the month ticket was created).
Hey Abby,
As Hannah mentioned, because of sync times and timezones affecting the data, depending on when exactly you are viewing your reports, different tickets will be referenced, offering different results.
I might suggest drilling through some of the data returned to see if you notice some tickets referenced in some reports and not others.
If you find that the tickets are matching as far as same number with same csats, I might suggest sending in a request to support@zendesk.com so that one of our agents can take a look at your account directly and we would be happy help troubleshoot further!
What I am noticing is that CSAT metrics in Explore count previous ratings if a ticket was rated prior to being replied to.
For instance, a ticket has an existing CSAT rating from 2 weeks ago, the ticket is replied to, worked on again and Solved again last week. The Explore metric for CSAT, filtering for last week, will count the CSAT rating from 2 weeks ago when filtering by "Solved Date, Last week" even though the actual CSAT rating was given 2 weeks ago.
Insights doesn't seem to have this issue.
Hi Judd!
We dug into this a little bit and according to the Explore metric reference and the Insights metric reference, events don't matter to CSAT. So, if a ticket is in a solved state and has a CSAT, should show up. What's more the ticket can't have more than one solved date, so that is updated when a ticket is re-solved.
You may want to look at the filters being used for your reports and make sure the two match. If you want us to dig into it further I would encourage you to contact support@zendesk.com with some exact report examples for us to take a look at.
Hope that helps!
We found a big discrepancy between Insight and Explore while moving a few of our "reports" over. In Insight, we had direct access to Organization (and User) fields. With Explore, these are only queried if they are tied to actual ticket data. So, it's not possible to do direct reporting on Organization fields such as our custom "Program Expiration" DATE field. Certain Organizations have not yet had tickets associated with them (and we have good reasons for this situation.) When reporting on soon to be past due dates, Explore queries miss Organizations which are present on Insight reports.
Will future Organization field reporting be available? This gap is a step backwards. Management is not pleased finding new gaps in our past comprehensive and accurate reports.
I found an issue regarding counts of created and solved tickets in Explore vs Insights. Please note that this may be data specific and not an issue with everyone.
For some reason (that Support is still looking into) some tickets show a count of 1 in Insights (and thus part of the total count of tickets) while in Explore it shows a count of 0. We have months where the count differences are 14 or more tickets between the two reporting tools.
Here is a screenshot of using the Count(tickets created) for a particular month. You can see for some the "count" is 0 so it you didn't list these by ticket ID the total count displayed would be different from what you see in Insights.
Just something to keep an eye out for.
Hey Bill,
I see you have a ticket open with our Customer Advocacy team related to this issue. We will continue working with you there to determine whether or not this is a bug.
Thanks for taking the time to share this with us!
Hi Brett,
I got word it was indeed a bug and has been escalated within the last week or so.
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