Zendesk Explore for reporting and analytics is designed to help you analyze, understand, and share your business information. Explore provides powerful, built-in reports that help you to view and analyze key information about your customers, and your support resources. When you need reports that are tailored to your unique needs, you can use the tools in Explore to build your own reports.
Once your report is ready, Explore helps you to share and collaborate on it with others. Reports can be shared on a one-time, or recurring basis to anyone in your organization and with some plans, to individuals who are not part of your support team.
In this series of getting started articles, you'll learn the basics you need to quickly get up and running with Explore. If you are new to Explore, start with these articles. For more resources, see Next steps at the end of this article. If you're unsure about any of the terms used in this article, you can look them up in the Zendesk Explore glossary.
This article contains the following topics:
Understanding Explore versions
Explore comes in three versions:
- Explore Lite: Gives you a selection of pre-built dashboards that you can use to analyze and understand Zendesk products.
- Explore Professional: Includes the pre-built dashboards and tools to help you design, customize, and share your own reports.
- Explore Enterprise: Builds on the capabilities of Explore Professional with enterprise-level features including live dashboards and advanced dashboard sharing capabilities.
For a complete list of capabilities, see Comparing Explore versions.
On-demand training for Explore
Did you know that all on-demand training courses for Zendesk products are now free?
The following course for Explore are currently available:
- Zendesk Overview: Explore
- On-Demand: Zendesk Explore, I
- On-Demand: Zendesk Explore, II
- On-Demand: Pre-built Dashboards
- On-Demand: Zendesk Chat Dataset
- On-Demand: Zendesk Talk Dataset
For a list of training for all Zendesk products, see the Zendesk training page.
Activating Explore
Before you can use Explore, you must activate it.
To activate Explore, you must be using Zendesk Support Professional, or Enterprise, have Administrator rights to your Support instance, and use a supported web browser.
When you first start Explore, it prepares your Zendesk data for reporting. Depending on the amount of information and tickets you have, this could take from a few minutes to a few hours. You can select an option to have Explore inform you when it's ready for use. For more information, see Activating Zendesk Explore.
Learning Explore features
This section introduces you to some of the main concepts you'll need to learn to get the best from Explore. To use most of the features and capabilities in this section, you'll need Explore Professional or Enterprise.
This section contains the following topics:
Giving access to Explore
To help ensure the security of your business information, Explore provides different user roles and permissions that give different levels of access to Explore's capabilities. Before your agents can access Explore, you must configure their roles and permissions.
The following roles can be configured:
- Editors can create custom reports and dashboards.
- Admins have all the same abilities as editors, but can manage viewers and permissions as well.
- Viewers can view and interact with pre-built and shared dashboards.
- No access cannot view or access Explore. This is the default role assigned to new users.
If you are using Support Professional, Explore permissions are configured by an admin in the Zendesk Admin Center. With Support Enterprise, you configure permissions by using custom roles.
For more information, see Giving agents access to Explore.
Dashboards
A dashboard is your window into your business information.
Zendesk provides you with pre-built dashboards that contains information about your support metrics, agent activity, and more. You can use pre-built best practices dashboards, duplicate them to create editable copies, or create completely new dashboards.
A dashboard is made up from components known as widgets which can contain a range of different items such as queries, images, text, and more. You can add as many widgets as you want to a dashboard, and arrange them in whatever format suits your needs. Finally, you can share dashboards with others in your organization.
For more information, see:
Datasets
- Metrics are quantitative data like the number of tickets, or the number of phone calls.
- Attributes are qualitative data like agent names and ticket channels. Adding an attribute to a query "slices" your results to make them more useful.
Before you begin to create queries, you must choose a dataset that gives access to the information you want. Explore features a range of different datasets that enable you to query your support tickets, Talk calls, and more. Typically, you will choose one of these pre-built datasets. However, you can also create copies of these datasets for testing (for example, if you want to create custom metrics).
For more information, see Working with datasets.
Queries
A query is a question you ask about your business information. You can ask simple question like “How many tickets do I have in an open status?” or complex questions like “Between March and December, which agents closed the most tickets?”
Query results are typically displayed as charts or tables. Explore chooses the most suitable chart format, but you can change that if you want. Once you’ve created a query, you can perform many operations on it like changing units, format, presentation, or adding complex calculations that manipulate the query results.
For more information, see:
Sharing and publishing
After you create a dashboard, you’ll likely want to share it with others in your organization. Sharing a dashboard sends an email inviting others to view it. You can additionally configure dashboards to be sent by email on a regular schedule.
You can make changes to a dashboard after you share it. When you are ready for others to see your changes, republish the dashboard.
For more information, see:
Next steps
Getting started guides
This article has given you an overview of the basic features of Zendesk Explore. However, Explore is capable of much more. For getting started information about other parts of Explore, see the following articles:
- Getting started with pre-built dashboards
- Getting started with the Explore interface
- Getting started creating queries
- Getting started creating dashboards
- Getting started modifying queries
- Getting started sharing dashboards
- Getting started with Explore: Walkthrough
- Getting started with custom metrics and attributes
More resources
The following are some great resources for finding your way around Explore and the documentation:
- Zendesk Explore Resources: A useful map of all available Explore documentation.
- Zendesk Explore FAQ: Answers to your frequently asked questions about Explore.
- If you're an Insights user, our Upgrading from Insights to Explore guide will help you move over to Explore.
- Our recipes will help you report for common business scenarios with Explore. For details, see Zendesk Explore recipes reference.
- If you want to find out about the latest updates made to the Explore docs, see What's new in the Explore docs?
44 Comments
Hi,
I'm trying to find my way around Explore.
I have created some custom metrics in Gooddata, among which the time tracking metrics described in your HC recipe - but now I can't find them in Explore. The metrics are set to be public.
Alternatively, when I tried to re-create this metric in Explore, I couldn't use the recipe that I used for Gooddata.
Would you have any advice on this?
Will Explore be replacing GoodData/Insights?
+1 for Niels comment!
Does opting into this program replace the current Reporting page in our Zendesk instance, or is it a separate environment? We'd like to make sure that by checking this feature out we'd still have access to our data and reporting presentation as it is in case we don't find this new feature satisfactory.
Hi Mary,
Thank you for reaching out.
As part of Explore EAP, we currently enable reporting for the following Guide functionality:
In addition, we are planning to release a Team Publishing dataset later this month.
And we are planning a lot more reporting around Guide / Help Center next year. One of the key themes revolves around content consumption.
Can you please share your request to be able to report on articles created by agent on this product feedback post? This is where we're keeping track of requests for enhancements to the Guide dataset.
Thanks,
Hannah
I find explore to be really cumbersome. Are there any good ZD apps that help with reporting?
Just an FYI: There is a typo in this document. I wanted to let you know because I would appreciate it if someone told me, had they noticed it. Thanks!
Hey Quentin,
Currently our Explore team is in the process of working on a migration tool that will help accounts transition from Insights to Explore. We don't have a firm eta on a release date for this but for users with interest in migrating early we have been connecting them to their Account Reps to look into early options.
I have pinged your Account Rep to try and connect with you since some of this link of questioning might involve personal account information.
As for any drawbacks or what you might lose in the process, there are still a few features for custom metrics that are not yet active in Explore that are in Insights, but coming soon. Again, your Account Rep can speak with you on your account specifics to help ensure that we cover all bases before processing a full migration.
Hi SHANNON CHAPMAN, I certainly do appreciate it :-)
Thanks so much for spotting and reporting this typo! It's now fixed.
Hi Jo - Explore Lite refreshes daily and Explore Pro refreshes hourly.
Hi Niels & Stéphanie - we have an issue with the ticket fields created by the Time Tracking app. To be specific, their names include a '(' character, which is currently not supported. We are working on a fix - however I don't yet have an ETA. Thank you for your patience.
Hi Brooke - we have released reporting for Guide Answer Bot and Guide Knowledge Capture a couple of weeks back. In October, we'll introduce reporting for Guide Team Publishing and Chat.
And we are planning a lot more in 2019! Looking specifically at Guide, one of the key themes will revolve around content consumption. If you have particular use cases you'd like us to consider, don't hesitate to share them here: https://explore.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360004294548-Help-Center-Reporting
Do you know if once Explore is ready to go and replace insights/good data; is it going to be part of existing packages like Professional or Enterprise, or is it going to be an addon option like the recent side conversations feature?
Hi, we have some information about calculated metrics at https://explore.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/236355787-Calculation-types-reference
This does include a link to date and time metrics. Does this help at all?
Hi Rob, at our office we started to work with "Explore" recently. And I have a question regarding the concept of "No replies" within "Tickets by first reply time brackets". I would like to ask what tickets are included as not replied - is it the ones deleted manually, in addition to the ones considered Spam by the system? Are also included the ones were the user help himself thanks to the Answer bot articles suggested? Thanks in advance!
Right now, it looks like it'll only work with Support and Talk data. Any plans to include Guide in this? There is no advanced reporting with Guide in GoodData/Insights, so I'm very curious to see if Explore will remedy that in the near future.
Hi Andrea,
I have created a new ticket for your concern. The ticket number is 4323529. Someone from our team will get in touch with you as soon as possible.
Thanks!
Hi!
Have been trying to get agents to see Explorer but cannot see Explorer on their profiles to add.
Is it even possible yet?
Help pls, -sari-
Hi Gemma, as I wasn't immediately sure of the answer to your questions, I've created a ticket. Someone should be in touch soon to help you get the answers you need. I'll then update the docs accordingly. Thanks!
Hi Carlos!
Thanks for the questions. I'll do my best to explain. Zendesk is working on slowly sunsetting our access to Gooddata. Currently no new users to the Zendesk platform have any Gooddata licenses applied to them. Explore is going to be the standard going forward.
Unfortunately, the reports you have in Gooddata are not something that can be transferred to Explore, or vice versa. I do apologize for any inconvenience, I know it can be frustrating to duplicate work.
Lastly, Explore and Gooddata do mostly the same things, but there are some differences. You can read about those on our help center here. There may not be perfect parity, even in the future. But we're trying to make Explore as robust and useful as we can.
Hope that helps!
Hello, me and my colleagues can't find the Explore functionality in Zendesk. Can somebody tell me where we can find it?
Hi Justin & Chandra - Explore will eventually replace GoodData / Insights.
We are planning to release Explore Professional later this year. Any customer having access to GoodData at the time of the commercial launch will be grandfathered onto Explore Professional (i.e. no extra charge).
We'll share more information on migration details & timeline shortly.
To follow up on Justin's question, if it does replace GoodData/Insights, will our existing reports be migrated or will we have to recreate them? Also, if we currently have a plan that includes GoodData/Insights reporting, will it include this solution or will we have to start paying extra for it?
Zendesk Team,
Are there any plans to allow for Administrative type queries to be built? For context, I am the Account Owner and Administrator for my company's Zendesk instance. At times, I would like to be able to perform audits on users, like the Groups they're associated with, Macro usage details, etc. I know I can currently run these types of queries using JSON, but it would be nice if there was a way to natively run some of these items.
Sincerely,
Michael Konstantin
Sr. Systems Administrator
Certified Zendesk Support Administrator
In the current ticketing UI, there is an option to Export # articles created for each support agent. It shows draft & published counts. Is this also going to be added to explore. This is a very important way to get a monthly and quarterly look at ownership of articles, growth of KB, and backlog (to be published).
Hi Nienke - Data storage is based on the location of your Zendesk Support instance, so if your Support instance is hosted in the EU, then your Explore data will be too.
Hi Warren,
Thanks for reaching out! Zendesk Explore function is available to the latest Zendesk Suite Team plan and up and not to your current plan Support Team plan. You may need to upgrade your plan to either a Zendesk Suite Team plan or a Support Professional plan in order to have access to Zendesk Explore. For more information, you can check this article: About the Zendesk Explore plan types
Kind regards,
Hey Jenesses!
Since you are on Support Enterprise currently, you should be activated on Explore Professional.
Let us know if this isn't the case!
Hi, We have Zendesk Support Team.
According to the matrix at the top of tis article Explore is available for the "Team" edition. But every time I try and add the product it is requesting that I move to the "Profession" edition. Why is it request this?
Thanks
Hi Tony - Access to Zendesk Explore will not replace the current Reporting page in your Zendesk any time soon. Both reporting interfaces will run in parallel.
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