Explore Recipe: Compare last month's tickets to the 12 month average

What's my plan?

In this Explore recipe you'll learn to create a report that shows last month's ticket count compared to a 12 month average.

What you'll need

Skill level: Intermediate

Time Required: 5-10 minutes

• Zendesk Explore Professional or Enterprise
• Editor or Admin permissions (see Adding users to Explore)
• Ticket data in Zendesk Support

How to create the report in Explore

Use the following steps to create this report in Explore:

1. In Explore, click the reports () icon.
2. In the Reports library, click New report.
3. On the Select a dataset page, click Support > Support - Tickets, then click Start report. The report builder opens.
4. Next, you'll create a standard calculated metric to find the monthly average for all time. You can use this formula to do so:
   

   COUNT(Tickets)/DCOUNT_VALUES([Ticket created - Month])

   Be sure to check compute separately.
5. Next, using the above custom metric, create a date range calculated metric to only return monthly averages for the last 12 months. In a new Date range calculated metric, under Original metric select your newly created custom metric, and for Defined on select Ticket created.
6. Under Date range, select the Advanced tab and select:
   • From the beginning of: 12 months in the past
   • To the end of: 1 month in the past
     
     
7. When you are finished, click Save.
8. Now that you've created the necessary metrics, you can build your report. In the Metrics panel of the report, add the default metric COUNT(Tickets Created - Last Month) and your custom date range calculated metric. Be sure to keep Tickets Created - Last Month listed as the first metric.
9. Under Visualization type select the KPI visualization. This will show the variation between tickets created last month and your monthly average.
10. After changing to a KPI chart, go to Chart configuration > Chart and select Show variation. Choose to display this variance as a percentage or difference.