Please Update Incorrect, Misleading Metrics and Filters On Pre-Built Dashboard "Support"
Feature Request Summary:
The prebuilt Dashboards contain some very misleading information. Apparently, this is not considered a bug, and despite confirmation with Support that yes, the data presented is incorrect and misleading, I was told to file a feature request.
Description/Use Cases:
Many metrics on the built in Support dashboard do not display what they purport to display.
For example “Created Tickets” on the first tab. It’s not easy to find out, but this uses the “Default” Support ticket dataset, and can be filtered by a number of attributes above it.
You cannot use the Default set to tell your viewer how many tickets *were created* on a specific form, because the Default set uses the *current or end state* of the ticket for attributes. This is incorrectly returning how many tickets that were created during that time period are *now* on the form I selected, not how many tickets were created on the form I selected, for this time period. The same holds true for the Submitter Role, Requester Org, Channel, Brand, and Group. These all return the *Current* channel/submitter role/group, not the channel/submitter role/group at the time the ticket was created.
Using the Updates dataset would get this closer, but still would be wrong, as it would pull the same "current status" attribute if you used ticket form, and would have to use the Field Change - Ticket_form_ID, for form, for example to be accurate. This would need to be adjusted for literally every attribute filtered on the first tab.
This also means the same problem holds true for this Dashboard and the filtering attributes of Ticket Group, Ticket Channel, and Submitter Role.These return incorrect results and would need individual filters set up from the Updates dataset, to the corresponding "Field Changes - Ticket Field" for each of these values, to return the actual number of tickets created with each attribute.
Business impact of limitation or missing feature:
This is incredibly misleading and is baked into the product as a Dashboard most users can see by default. This makes it a bad source of data and leads to confusion and problems with reconciling data across various reports, as well as making it seem like reporting is possible/available in a manner that it just isn’t and shouldn’t be copied or replicated.
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I ended up writing a custom metric for myself that accurately returns the number of tickets created on each form, but it's still wild to me that the pre-built Dashboard is using the data so incorrectly and continues to show misleading statistics and imply you can build queries that aren't possible with the default metrics and attributes in these datasets.
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The only update has been for Zendesk to include even more misleading reports. I'm pretty unhappy!
More stuff that's just completely busted:
Last assignment to resolution -- This metric was written badly and doesn't function. On top of that, the report on the Assignee Activity tab ignores the date filter when it is changed.
On the first tab, there's a whole report that purports to show you how many tickets were created and solved by date -- except anyone who has used Explore knows that you cannot actually display that information on the same chart, because the time filter will apply to both the Ticket Solved and Ticket Created metrics, resulting in a chart of only tickets that were both created *and* solved during the time period specified. It will always show the tickets created and tickets solved overlay as identical, which is a great clue that this report is broken. Another great clue is if tickets take longer than 24 hours to solve, just set it to yesterday, and you'll see it says no tickets were created or solved, even though that's absolutely wrong.
It's pretty frustrating to see that Zendesk is making no effort to fix the logical errors in the Explore product. -
CJ Johnson thank you for describing this limitation in detail – I ran into the same problem.
Zendesk, I know there are always competing priorities, but I'm really surprised this limitation hasn't been addressed. Setting independent time filters for created vs. resolved tickets is table stakes for any support reporting. This issue applies to custom reports and dashboards as well – there is no way to solve it, even by building our own custom reports, as confirmed by your support team.
Please combine all of the similar feedback (I've found other threads here too) and get this prioritized. I am truly surprised that I can't answer these basic questions about our support tickets.
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Honestly, I have very few metrics that I can be very confident are immediately accurate, or don't need some degree of explanation, or debugging from time to time. Generally I need to have working sessions where we open the report and fine tune it directly, which creates so much fragmentation of work on reports cloned across dashboards. I am pretty uncomfortable relying on Explore for anything more than exporting data sets and crunching the numbers in Excel.
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