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Get started with Explore and compare to Insights

Rob Stack
  • Edited
Zendesk Documentation Team

What's my plan?

Explore Professional and Enterprise

If you are moving from Insights to Explore, the first thing you need to do is activate Explore. You can add other users and configure their access now or when you're ready.

Once you've activated Explore you can get started learning Explore and compare it to Insights. Be sure to check out the Explore pre-built dashboards for easy, out-of-the box reporting.

The following sections will help you complete these tasks.  

Setting up Explore

Activating Explore (Required)

You have to activate Explore to start using it. Activating sets up your Explore account and gets your data ready. This might take a few hours, but we'll let you know when it's ready.

While you work through the migration, minimize disruption to your business by continuing to use your Insights reports while you and your agents get set up and learn Explore.

See Activating Zendesk Explore.

Adding your agents

After you activate Explore, only you have access to it. Because it's important to control access to your important business data, you'll need to manually give each agent access. You don't have to add and configure all of your agents now, but do so when you're ready to give agents access.

You can give agents full access (Admin), permission to create and edit reports (Editor), or read-only (Viewer) access when you add them to Explore.

Currently, you must add agents individually. There is not yet a bulk add or API option to add agents.

See Adding users to Explore.

Configuring agent access to data 

Datasets give you access to business information stored in your Zendesk account. You'll read more about these in the guide.

Each Zendesk product has its own dataset and you can control access to these individually. Think about the level of access you want to give agents, then configure dataset authorizations in Explore.

See Setting editor and admin permissions.

Learning Explore

The getting started guide leads you through the basics of Explore from terminology through to creating and sharing reports. It also gives you a tour of the Explore interface.

Reading this guide is highly recommended for newcomers to Explore. Additionally, Zendesk offers a range of free online and instructor-led training.

See Getting started with Zendesk Explore.

 

Comparing Insights and Explore capabilities and workflow

While many of the concepts are similar, there are differences between Insights and Explore capabilities and workflow. You might not need the resources in this section if you only use the Insights pre-built dashboard and haven't created custom reports in Insight.

After you move to Explore, the Overview, Leaderboard, and Satisfaction tabs are removed from the built-in reporting page. You can use Explore pre-built dashboards for those reports. The Knowledge Base and Search tabs (for Guide), and the Community tab (for Gather) are not powered by Insights and won't be removed.

Viewing the Explore pre-built dashboards

Just like with Insights, Explore includes a number of pre-built reports arranged in dashboards, covering many common business scenarios. You can use them as they are or you can make copies of them to use as a starting point for your own analysis.

You'll also want to understand how the Insights pre-built dashboards map to Explore pre-built dashboards.

To view the Explore pre-built dashboards

  • In Explore, click the dashboards icon () in the left toolbar. You'll see a list of all pre-built dashboards as well as dashboards that others have created.  

Choose your next step

Prepare to stop using Insights   → ←  Go back to the start

Choose your next step

Start recreating your Insights custom reports in Explore   → ←  Go back to the start

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4 Comments

  • Richard Hilgart

    Probably not the right place to ask this question, but I ve tried to find an answer everyhwere. Is there a template for Zendesk Guide to add "foldable tiles" like in this article? Or does this require coding on our end?

    Any help would be highly appreciated?

    0
  • Rob Stack
    Zendesk Documentation Team

    Hi Richard Hilgart, thanks for the question.

    We don't currently have a template for this, but it's definitely something I'll add to the list (though that might take a little while to get to!).
    In the meantime, everything is defined in the HTML of the article to see how it works. A couple of clues:

    You need the:
     <div id="bootstrap-overrides">
          <div id="accordion">
    near the beginning of the article and then each expand/collapse column is contained in a

    <div class="card">
    element (each with a different ID).

    Hopefully, that gives you a start. Here's an example HTML source for a very simple article with two expand/collapse sections.

    <div class="body"></div>
    <div id="topic_uny_ffc_pt" class="topic nested1">
    <p>This is your introductory text.</p>
    <div class="body">
    <div id="bootstrap-overrides">
    <div id="accordion">
    <div class="card">
    <div id="hd_up" class="card-header">
    <button class="btn btn-link" data-target="#intro_up" data-toggle="collapse">&gt; This is section 1&nbsp;</button>
    </div>
    <div id="intro_up" class="collapse hide" data-parent="#accordion">
    <h2 id="h_7c1da0ef-91f0-453d-9225-3029955dfdde" class="card-body">
    <a name="intro_up"></a>Section 1
    </h2>
    <div class="card-body">
    <div class="body">
    <div class="body">
    <div id="topic_fvf_xlr_43b" class="topic nested2" aria-labelledby="ariaid-title3">This is the text that will be expanded for section 1.</div>
    </div>
    </div>
    </div>
    </div>
    </div>
    <p>This is some other text that will always be visible.</p>
    <div class="card">
    <div id="hd_vd" class="card-header">
    <button class="btn btn-link" data-target="#intro_vd" data-toggle="collapse">&gt; This is section 2</button>
    </div>
    <div id="intro_vd" class="collapse hide" data-parent="#accordion">
    <h2 id="h_d9072e3c-e70b-4dea-8b33-cd2577760e6g" class="card-body">
    <a name="intro_vd"></a>Section 2
    </h2>
    <div class="card-body">
    <div id="topic_gvh_fmr_43b" class="topic nested2" aria-labelledby="ariaid-title7">
    <div id="topic_gvh_fmr_43b" class="topic nested2" aria-labelledby="ariaid-title7">
    <div id="topic_hhc_t4r_43b" class="topic nested2" aria-labelledby="ariaid-title15">
    <div id="topic_hhc_t4r_43b" class="topic nested2" aria-labelledby="ariaid-title15">
    <p class="p">This is the text that will be expanded for section 2.</p>
    <p class="p">&nbsp;</p>
    </div>
    </div>
    </div>
    </div>
    </div>
    </div>
    </div>
    </div>
    </div>
    <div id="topic_wl5_zdb_rt" class="topic nested1">
    <div class="body">
    <h2 class="p">This section will always be visible</h2>
    Section text goes here.
    </div>
    </div>
    </div>
    </div>

     

    (that HTML might have formatted a little 'wonky', so you might have to do a little extra formatting!)

    0
  • Nicole Saunders
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Thanks for sharing that, Rob!

    I'll add that there's a user tip in the community here: help Center Collapsible headers in articles

    And for future reference, the Guide Q&A topic is the best place to ask about ways to customize your Help Center theme.

    0
  • Richard Hilgart

    Thanks a lot for the quick feedback! Hope we can create this for us.

     

    0

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