Evaluating reporting and analytics in your Zendesk Suite trial

This part of the Zendesk Suite trial evaluation guide helps you evaluate reporting and analytics features in the Zendesk Suite to see how they'll work for you. Your trial is on the Suite Professional plan and includes Explore Professional features.

Explore for reporting and analytics gives you the tools you need to analyze, understand, and share your business information. Information for most Zendesk features can be reported in easy to read prebuilt reports that you can filter to your own needs. When you want to dig deeper, you can use Explore's powerful reporting tools to build your own reports.

Follow the steps in this guide to try out reporting and analytics. Each task typically takes less than 10 minutes to complete (though activating Explore in step 1 can take a bit longer).

This article contains the following sections:

• Step 1: Activate Explore
• Step 2: Take a look at the prebuilt dashboards
• Step 3: Create a simple custom report (Professional and Enterprise)
• Step 4: Create a dashboard (Professional and Enterprise)
• Step 5: Share your dashboard
• What's next?

Step 1: Activate Explore

Before you can start digging into your data, you'll need to activate Explore. This is a necessary step as you might have already created tickets in Support, articles in Guide, or tested other support processes. Explore needs to examine the products you have installed and read in the necessary data you'll need to view and create reports. This is a once only operation for you to perform and might take up to two hours. Don't worry, your agents won't have to perform this step.

Try it out

In this section, you'll open and activate Explore for the first time. If another admin has already done this, you can skip activation, but you'll need to make sure that an admin has given you access to complete the rest of this evaluation.

To open and activate Explore

1. From any Zendesk product, open the product tray and click Explore.

   

2. Explore opens on the activation page. Click Activate to start setting things up. This might take up to two hours, but if you are testing a new account, it will usually take a lot less time. In the meantime, have a cup of coffee and browse through the Explore help center to read about some of the things you'll be able to do. You can have Explore notify you with an email once setup is complete.

   

3. Once Explore notifies you that it's finished setting up, you're ready to go. If you want any other agents to help evaluate Explore, you'll need to give them access. Read Giving agents access to Explore if you want to do this.

Step 2: Take a look at the prebuilt dashboards

Now that you've set up Explore, you can start looking at some of the best practices dashboards that Zendesk created for you. A dashboard is a collection of reports collected on one or more pages. The available dashboards change regularly, but you can read all about them in Understanding dashboards or, as you'll learn shortly, you can just browse the list yourself.

Try it out

In this example, you'll take a look at the prebuilt Zendesk Support dashboard to discover the average number of tickets created in your Zendesk instance each day of the week.

To see the report

1. In any Zendesk product, open the product tray.
2. Click Explore () . Explore opens showing a list of available dashboards.
3. From the list of dashboards, choose the Zendesk Support dashboard.
4. In the Zendesk Support dashboard, scroll down until you see the Average tickets created by day of week report.

   

Tip: If you're wondering how often these reports update with new information, it depends on which plan you're using. Explore Lite reports update every day, Explore Professional and Enterprise reports update once an hour (though Explore Enterprise also features some reports that update in near-real-time). For detailed information, see Data refresh intervals for Explore plans.

If you're using Explore Lite, you can skip to the What's next? section, but if you're interested in the more advanced reports you can create and share with Explore Professional and Enterprise, feel free to read on.

Step 3: Create a simple custom report (Professional and Enterprise)

Sometimes, the prebuilt dashboards don't contain exactly the report that you need. In many cases however, you can create your own. Explore Professional and Enterprise include many hundreds of metrics and attributes you can use to mix-and-match your own reports. In this section, you'll learn a basic example of creating a custom report and learn how to find many more examples.

Try it out

In this custom report, you'll create a simple report that shows one-touch tickets. These are tickets that were solved with only one agent reply. This report is a great way to gain context into your support efforts. Feel free to experiment with the various settings to get different results.

To create the report

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 and then click Start report. The report builder opens.
4. Next, add your metric, the thing you want to measure. In this case, you'll add the number of one-touch tickets. In the Metrics panel, click Add.
5. From the list of metrics, choose Agent replies distribution > One-touch tickets, then click Apply.

   

   Explore displays the total number of one-touch tickets in your account.

6. Explore reports can return a lot of data. Using filters is a great way to restrict the results you return. In the Filters panel, click Add.
7. From the list of attributes, choose Time - Ticket solved > Ticket solved - Date, then click Apply.
8. In the Filters panel, click the Ticket solved - Date filter you just added.
9. On the filter page, click Edit date ranges.
10. On the Advanced tab of the Date range page, choose an appropriate range to view, such as 30 days in the past, then click Apply.

    

11. In the Columns panel, click Add.
12. From the list of attributes, choose Time - Ticket solved > Ticket solved - Date, then click Apply.
13. From the visualization type menu (), choose a Line chart.

    

14. Click the title at the top of the report (by default, "New report") and enter a new name for it like One-touch tickets by date.
15. When you're finished, click Save.

For a more detailed introduction, see Creating reports. This custom report was taken from our extensive collection of sample Explore reports known as recipes. See them all at Explore recipes reference.

Step 4: Create a dashboard (Professional and Enterprise)

Reports are great, but you'll usually want to collect bunch of reports together to send them to others in your organization. Explore dashboards are used to accomplish this. There are two ways you can do this:

• Create a copy of an existing dashboard or one of the prebuilt dashboards and edit it.
• Create a brand new dashboard.

Try it out

In this example, you'll create a new dashboard and add the report you created in Step 3.

To find all you need to know to create your own dashboards, see Creating dashboards.

To create the dashboard

1. In Explore, click the Dashboards library icon () on the left side bar.
2. Click New dashboard.

   

   A new blank dashboard opens.

3. In your new dashboard, click Add > Add report.
4. On the Add report page, choose the One-touch tickets by date report you created in Step 3, then click Add reports.

   

5. Your report is added to the dashboard. You'll notice it probably looks too small or is in the wrong place. You can drag it around and resize it just like you'd resize a window on your computer.
6. Once you've got the report positioned just how you want it, click the title at the top of the dashboard (by default Untitled) and give the dashboard a name like One-touch tickets dashboard.

   

   The dashboard is saved automatically. Keep it open and move onto Step 5.

To find all you need to know to create your own dashboards, see Creating dashboards.

Step 5: Share your dashboard

You can share dashboards with agents in your Zendesk account, groups of agents, and with some Explore plans, people who don't have an account in your Zendesk instance.

Try it out

In this example, you'll share your dashboard with a single person.

To share your dashboard

1. In your dashboard, click Share.
2. On the Share dashboard page, find and select the people or groups you want to share the dashboard with (this example uses "Rob Stack"). You can type a partial name into the filter box to filter how many names and groups are shown in the list.

   

3. When you are finished, click Invite.

The people you invite will receive an email. The email contains a link they can click to access the dashboard. If you later make updates to the dashboard, the people you invited will not see the updates unless you publish the dashboard first (from the same menu you found the Share command).

To learn all you need to know about sharing dashboards, see Sharing dashboards.

What's next?

If you're ready to start digging further into Explore, start with out getting started guide. To see all of the Explore documentation and information about free training, see Zendesk Explore resources for reporting and analytics.