While Explore does not report macro usage, you can get useful information into your reports by having your macro add tags to a ticket when it triggers. For example, could your most popular macro responses be added to your Help Center to deflect tickets? Or can you safely remove certain macros that are not being utilized as often?
Use this article to learn how to add tags to your macros and generate Explore reports from the tags. You can either add tags to existing macros or create new ones. See Organizing and managing your macros and Creating macros for tickets for more information.
What you'll need
Skill level: Easy
Time required: 20 minutes
- Zendesk Explore Professional or Enterprise
- Editor or Admin permissions (see Giving agents access to Explore)
- Ticket and agent data in Zendesk Support
Adding ticket tags when a macro is run
To add tags to a macro
- In Zendesk Support, click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Manage > Macros.
- Click Add macro or select Edit from the macros options menu (
) next to the macro you want to edit.
- In the editing macro page, select Add tags from the drop-down list in the Actions section.
- Add the tag of your choice in the text box to the right. If you're using multiple tags, use spaces to separate them.
The edit macro page will look like this:
- Click Create or Save.
Now, whenever the macro is triggered, it will add the tag you chose to the ticket. In this case, the tag unique_macro_tag will be added.
Reporting on macro tags in Explore
In this procedure, you'll create a report that shows all tickets with the unique_macro_tag tag. Before you start, ensure that the macro you created has run a few times and that Explore has synchronized the latest data from the tickets dataset. Synchronization takes place once an hour.
To create a report to list the macro tags
- In Explore, click the query (
) icon.
- In the Queries library, click New query.
- On the Choose a dataset page, click Support > Tickets > Support: Tickets, then click New query. Query builder opens.
- Next, add a metric. A metric is the thing you want to measure, in this case, the number of tickets. In the Metrics panel, click Add.
- From the list of metrics, choose Tickets > Tickets, then click Apply.
- Next, add the ticket tags attribute that will break down the number of tickets by tag. In the Rows section, click Add.
- From the list of attributes, choose Ticket > Ticket Tags and Ticket > Ticket ID, then click Apply. This generates a table of all ticket tags, and the ticket ID number of each ticket they are associated with.
- Now, filter the list of attributes so you only see tickets that have the unique_macro_tag tag associated. In the Rows panel, click the Ticket Tags attribute.
- On the Selected tab of the Ticket Tags page, ensure only unique_macro_tag is selected, and then click Apply.
A table showing all your tickets with the unique_macro_tag tag displays. This indicates all of your tickets that the macro ran on.
16 Comments
This does not seem to work in our case. When I choose Ticket Tags and I want to filter on it is only shows me a list of unique combinations of tags that are on tickets and never a single ticket tag. It also looks like it is not showing everything. I can see that the combinations are sorted alphabetically, but it never reaches the tags that start with anything other then a number or a. Why is this? Is this a bug? And better yet, can this be solved? If I can't filter on a single tag, Explore is going to be useless for me and Booking.com in general.
Hi Mirjam, I'm sorry you've been having problems. I wonder, do you have a very large number of different tags on your tickets? I wonder if that could be causing this. I will open a ticket for you so someone can help you investigate.
In the meantime, one way to get around this if you are searching for tickets with a specific tag might be to use a standard calculated metric. In the metric, use this formula:
IF ([Ticket tags]="your_tag_name") THEN [Ticket ID] ENDIF
replace your_tag_name with the tag you want to search for.
I hope this helps.
I am having the same issue as Mirjam. I was wondering if there were additional instructions on how to utilize the standard calculated metric provided or if there was any update on this issue?
Hi Natalie! The first step that we're recommending that you take here would be to make sure that you're using the most up-to-date dataset. Can you start by creating a new dataset following the instructions in this article and then let us know if the issue persists?
Hello. Is there anyway to include the Macro Name in explore reporting, as well as the tag?
Hi Sandra, it's currently not possible to include macro names in Explore but it's possible to report on tags. Do you have a particular use case or something that you want to achieve?
Hi Sandra,
While as Jemuel mentioned the macro name itself isn't pulled into Explore, if your objective is simply to make your reporting more human readable you could create a 'renamed set' based on the 'ticket tags' attribute.
I've used this technique in the screenshot below to replace the 'agent_ooo' tag with the text 'Out of Office'.
If that is something you might be interested in you can find more information here.
Hi there,
Seeing the instructions below: there are 2 datasets available for support, one is "support: tickets" and the other one "support: tickets, users, organizations".
Will I get accurate results if I use Support: tickets dataset, it would be easier to use because in this datasets I can pick individual tag. I have the same issue as others here that in support: tickets, users, organizations I have a combination of tags available only.
Thanks,
Mari
Hey there Mari-Liis,
This is a very good question! The good news is that the Support: Tickets dataset is the latest schema and it should be the most recent/updated dataset. It's recommend to use Support: Tickets over Support: tickets, users, organizations. This article might be helpful too: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360022191014#h_6a7161c2-dae3-4b44-91b8-6ef111b79639
I hope this helps!
Hi all,
I've now filtered this down to specific tags I'm looking at, and changed it to a much more readable column graph.
Have had to change the ticket tags to "column" instead of "rows" to achieve this.
Having a little trouble now defining a date range for the data. How would I go about altering this so it's always showing me the previous week's data?
Hey, Logan.
You should be able to add a date filter in the same fashion that you would another query. For example, if you add a filter for Date - Ticket Created and set it to "Last Week", you should be able to look at only the tickets created in the last week.
You're welcome to set that filter for any of the date attributes you'd like, such as Date - Ticket Solved or Date - Ticket Updated.
We are very interested in seeing macros being available at a ticket updates data set level.
We want to measure more activity and highlight more information in events such as who is using which macros (most cases the agent / updater / person applying the macro will never historically be an assignee of the ticket).
I thought that adding tags would be the answer to this but it turns out that tags are not related to ticket updates data set and therefore update level attributes such as updater are also not available.
Is there any way to work around this or is anyone looking to add tags to an update data set level or make tags available as a text field change?
My use case is only one idea but so much more could be done with reporting on tags at update level.
Hey there Results,
Unfortunately, the only workaround we have available would be using Ticket tags.
However, this is something that has been requested quite a bit and I would recommend leaving a comment here ( https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360029387174 ). The Product Manager looks like they're watching that thread, and it would be great to have more examples of use cases.
Is there a way to report on the agent who applied a specific tag at the time the ticket was updated? For example, I'd like to know which agents use a certain macro (which applies a unique tag) and how often.
Danny
I don't believe that is possible in reporting. The tag changes are not recorded in the Ticket Updates dataset as part of the field changes. So you would have to examine the ticket events in Support or extract details using the API.
You can of course count the number of times a macro was applied using the tag count. But not count the agent that applied it.
Sorry about that.
Hi all,
There is a great solution – Advanced Macros Usage Reporting for Zendesk. It is a part of the Advanced Macros by Pythia app https://www.zendesk.com/apps/support/advanced-macros-by-pythia
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