A practical guide to Freshdesk custom reports (2025)

If you work in customer support, you live and breathe data. It’s supposed to be your guide to understanding team performance, spotting trends, and ultimately, making customers happier. Freshdesk has a feature for this called Freshdesk custom reports, designed to help you slice and dice your support data any way you want.

But let’s be real. Building those reports can feel like a full-time job. You spend hours pulling data together, only for it to tell you what went wrong last week. It’s useful, sure, but it doesn’t help you get ahead of the next fire.

This guide will walk you through what Freshdesk custom reports are all about, how to set them up, and where they tend to fall flat. More importantly, we’ll look at how a little AI can help you leapfrog from looking at yesterday's data to automatically fixing today's problems.

What are Freshdesk custom reports?

Think of Freshdesk custom reports as your personal data sandbox inside Freshdesk’s analytics. Instead of being stuck with the pre-built dashboards that show everyone the same thing, you get to build your own reports from the ground up. You pick the exact metrics, filters, and charts that actually matter to your team.

The whole point is to get answers to your specific questions. For instance, you could build a report to figure out:

• How many tickets about "Product X" did Sarah resolve last month?

• What’s our average first response time for our VIP customers on Mondays versus Fridays?

• Are we getting more tickets about billing issues this quarter compared to last?

You build these reports using a drag-and-drop editor, pulling in "widgets" for different charts and numbers. You can filter by just about anything (ticket status, source, custom fields) and group the data by agent, team, or product. It’s a pretty flexible system for when you need to answer very specific business questions.

The only catch? This feature is only included in the higher-tier Freshdesk plans (Pro and Enterprise), so if you're a smaller team on a starter plan, you might not have access to it.

How to create basic Freshdesk custom reports

Alright, let's roll up our sleeves and see how you actually build one of these reports. While it’s flexible, it does require you to know exactly what you’re looking for before you start. Here’s the general gist of how it works.

A screenshot of a Freshdesk reporting dashboard, which is the starting point for creating Freshdesk custom reports.

1. Start a new report

   • First, head over to the Reports icon in your Freshdesk menu and jump into Analytics.

   • You’ll see a New Report button. Click that, and you’ll be looking at a blank canvas. Give it a name you'll remember, like "Weekly Agent Ticket Breakdown."

2. Add your widgets

   • On the right side of the screen, you'll see a library of widgets. These are the visual blocks of your report, like bar charts, line graphs, and data tables.

   • You can grab a pre-made widget from the 'Gallery' if you find one that’s close to what you need, or you can drag a blank 'Chart' or 'Text' widget onto your canvas to start from scratch.

3. Set up your metrics and filters

   • This is the most important part. Click on the widget you just added to open up its configuration panel.

   • Here you'll tell Freshdesk what to measure. For metrics, you might pick things like 'Tickets created' or 'Average resolution time'. Then, you add filters to zoom in on specific data, like 'Status is Resolved' or 'Source is Email'.

   • You can also use the 'Group by' option to slice the data. For example, you could group by 'Agent Name' to see a performance breakdown for each person on your team.

4. Pick a chart

   • How do you want to see this data? Freshdesk gives you a bunch of options: bar charts, line charts, donut charts, or just a simple summary table.

   • Play around with the different visualizations to see which one tells the story most clearly. A bar chart is great for comparisons, while a line chart is perfect for showing a trend over time.

5. Save and share it

   • Once your report looks good, hit save. You can also schedule it to be automatically emailed to you and your stakeholders every week or month, so you don't have to remember to pull it manually.

Key features and limitations of Freshdesk custom reports

Freshdesk's reporting tools are pretty powerful, but it’s good to have a clear picture of what they do well and where you might find yourself wishing for more.

Features: What Freshdesk custom reports do well

• You can get super specific: You have fine-grained control over your data. If you want to know the average handle time for tickets tagged 'feature-request' from German customers in Q2, you can build a report for that.

• They look good: With different chart types, you can make your data easy for others to understand. This is a big help when you need to present your findings to leadership.

• You can dig deeper: The reports are interactive. If you see a spike in a bar chart, you can often click on it to drill down and see the actual tickets that make up that number.

Limitations of Freshdesk custom reports: Where the manual approach falls short

While those features are nice, they also highlight some of the deeper frustrations that come with traditional reporting.

• They take a lot of time to build: Let's be honest, you're a support manager, not a data analyst. Figuring out exactly which metrics and filters will give you the answer you're looking for is a job in itself. You can easily sink a whole morning into building a single report, which is time you could be spending coaching your team.

• They only tell you what already happened: Reports are like looking in the rearview mirror. They’re great at telling you that you had a surge in password reset tickets last Tuesday, but they can't warn you that another surge is building right now or suggest what to do about it. It’s all reactive.

• Your data is trapped in Freshdesk: Your company's knowledge doesn't just live in support tickets. The answer to a customer's question might be in a Confluence article, a Google Doc your product team wrote, or even in a conversation that happened in a Slack channel. Freshdesk reports can't see any of that, so you're always working with an incomplete picture.

• The "so what?" problem: This is the big one. A report might proudly tell you that 30% of your tickets are about shipping status. That’s a great piece of information, but what do you do with it? The report just sits there. It’s on you to manually create a new saved reply, write a knowledge base article, or design a new workflow to handle those tickets better. There's a huge gap between seeing the data and actually doing something about it.

Because of these limitations, many support leaders find themselves spending more time being data janitors than actually using the insights to improve their operations.

Beyond Freshdesk custom reports: Using AI to get answers from Freshdesk

What if you could skip the manual report-building and have the key insights find you? And what if those insights came with a button to act on them immediately? That's the idea behind adding an AI layer like eesel AI to your setup. It plugs directly into Freshdesk in a few minutes and starts analyzing your data to find opportunities you can actually use.

From manual building to automated discovery

Instead of you spending hours trying to figure out which reports to build, eesel AI does the heavy lifting for you. It scans your past Freshdesk tickets, automatically clusters them by topic, and shows you exactly where your biggest automation opportunities are. Its dashboard doesn't just show you ticket topics; it points out gaps in your knowledge base and highlights the repetitive questions that are draining your team's time. The insights are delivered to you, no digging required.

The eesel AI dashboard showing automated analysis of ticket data, a key advantage over manual Freshdesk custom reports.

From siloed data to connected knowledge

Remember how Freshdesk reports can only see Freshdesk data? That's a huge blind spot. The answers your agents need are often scattered everywhere. eesel AI connects to all of it: Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, Slack, you name it. This means when it analyzes a customer question, it has the full context from your entire company's brain, leading to way more accurate answers and a true understanding of what’s going on.

An infographic showing how eesel AI connects to multiple knowledge sources, unlike the siloed nature of Freshdesk custom reports.

From insight to action

This is the most important shift. A Freshdesk report is a static PDF or dashboard. An AI tool turns that data into an action.

• Insight: A report shows a high volume of tickets about "how to change a subscription."

• Action: With that insight, eesel’s AI Agent can be set up to instantly answer that question for customers, deflecting the ticket before it ever reaches a human. It uses your existing knowledge base articles and past ticket replies to craft the perfect response.

The best part is you can see how well this would work before you even flip the switch. With eesel AI, you can run a simulation on thousands of your past Freshdesk tickets. It gives you a clear, risk-free preview of your potential automation rate and how much time and money you could save.

A view of eesel AI's simulation feature, which tests automation potential on historical data, offering a proactive alternative to Freshdesk custom reports.

Freshdesk custom reports pricing

Here's the catch: the ability to create Freshdesk custom reports isn't available on every plan. It's considered a premium feature, so you'll need to be on one of ahe higher-priced tiers.

According to Freshdesk's pricing page, custom reporting kicks in at the Pro plan.

If your team is on the Free or Growth plan, you’ll have to make do with the standard, pre-built reports, which don't offer much in the way of customization. To really unlock your data, you’ll need to budget for an upgrade.

Stop building Freshdesk custom reports, start taking action

Freshdesk custom reports are a solid tool if you have the time and expertise to go on a data deep-dive. They give you the flexibility to investigate nearly any aspect of your support performance.

But their real-world value is often held back by the manual effort required to build them, their inability to see data outside of Freshdesk, and the chasm between finding an insight and acting on it.

Modern support teams need more than just data; they need intelligence that works for them. Tools like eesel AI are built for this. By connecting all your company knowledge, automatically flagging automation opportunities, and turning those insights into action, you can finally get out of the reporting hamster wheel. Instead of just documenting the past, you can start building a smarter, more efficient future for your support team.

Curious to see what’s really hiding in your Freshdesk tickets? Try eesel AI for free and run a simulation on your own data in minutes.