A practical guide to Zendesk advanced AI performance metrics

So, you've got Zendesk's AI up and running. That's a great first step. But how do you actually know if it's helping? Measuring your AI's performance is the only way to tell if you're saving time, making customers happier, and getting your money's worth. While Zendesk has some impressive AI tools, figuring out how well they’re doing can feel like trying to solve a puzzle with half the pieces missing. Many support teams find themselves digging through different dashboards, trying to connect the dots, all while dealing with a complicated pricing model.

This guide is here to help you cut through the noise. We'll walk through the main Zendesk Advanced AI Performance Metrics, show you where to find them, and talk about the common headaches you might run into. We'll also look at how a more unified approach can give you the clarity you need to actually make your AI better, not just measure it.

What are Zendesk Advanced AI Performance Metrics?

To get your AI agent pulling its weight, you need to understand the language it speaks. Zendesk uses a few key metrics to grade its AI's performance. Let's break down the most important ones you'll bump into.

Automated resolutions: The holy grail

An "automated resolution" is just what it sounds like: a customer conversation that your AI handles all by itself, from start to finish, without a human agent ever getting involved. This is the big one inside Zendesk because it's a direct measure of workload reduction. Every automated resolution is one less ticket for your team.

But here's the catch. For a lot of Zendesk plans, this is the very metric that determines your bill. This usage-based pricing can lead to some awkward situations and budget surprises, which we'll get into a little later.

Escalation rate

The escalation rate is the percentage of conversations that the AI hands off to a human agent. You can think of it as the AI raising its virtual hand and saying, "I'm stuck, I need some help with this one."

A high escalation rate isn't always a catastrophe, especially when you're just starting out. But it can signal that something's not quite right. It might mean you have gaps in your knowledge base, your bot's conversational flows are clunky, or customers are asking questions that are just too tricky for the AI right now. The idea is to keep an eye on this number and work on bringing it down over time by teaching your AI more.

Deflection rate and understood conversations

A "deflected" conversation is any chat that doesn't end with an escalation to a person. Tied to this is the "understood conversations" metric, which shows how often the AI successfully matched a customer's question to a relevant answer.

It’s tempting to look at a high deflection rate and pat yourself on the back, but this number can be deceiving. If a customer gets frustrated with the bot and just gives up, that counts as a "deflection," but it's definitely not a win for customer experience. This metric gives you a piece of the story, but it says nothing about whether the customer was actually happy.

BSAT (Bot satisfaction)

BSAT is basically CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), but for bots. It asks customers to rate their chat with the AI, usually on a simple 1-5 scale. This gives you a direct feedback loop on whether the AI's answers were helpful and if the whole experience felt good.

While it's useful, BSAT has the same old problem as CSAT. Response rates can be pretty low, so you're only hearing from a small fraction of your users. A low score tells you that a customer was unhappy, but it doesn't always tell you why.

How to track Zendesk Advanced AI Performance Metrics

Zendesk keeps its AI analytics in a dedicated dashboard, but the info you need is spread across a few different tabs. Knowing where to look is half the battle when you're trying to piece together the full story.

The overview tab: Your morning check-in

Think of the Overview tab as your 30,000-foot view. It shows you the big numbers: total conversations, automated resolutions, and escalation rates over a period of time. It’s the perfect spot for a quick daily or weekly check-in to see how things are trending. For example, if you just tweaked a conversation flow and see a sudden jump in escalations, this is where you'd spot it first.

The contact reasons tab: Understanding your metrics

This is where you can start digging into the details. The Contact Reasons tab shows you how your AI is performing on specific topics (or "use cases") and which knowledge sources it's pulling from. You can see which questions your AI handles beautifully and which ones consistently end up with a human.

This is your best friend for spotting gaps in your knowledge base. If you see an article is being used all the time in chats that get escalated, that's a huge clue that the article needs to be updated or clarified.

Filtering and customizing reports

Zendesk allows you to filter your dashboard by the specific AI agent, the channel (web chat, social media, etc.), dates, and other details. This is helpful for zeroing in on specific problems.

Still, even with these filters, trying to connect your bot's performance here with your human team's performance over in Zendesk's Analytics Dashboard can feel like a clunky, manual chore.

The hidden challenges of measuring AI performance

Zendesk gives you the numbers, but many support leaders find they don't tell the whole story. The way the platform is designed can sometimes obscure what's really going on with your AI's performance and even lead to some nasty budget surprises.

Challenge 1: Unpredictable costs

Zendesk’s pricing for advanced AI often includes a fee for every automated resolution. That's right, the better your AI does its job, the more you pay. This model essentially punishes you for being successful and makes it almost impossible to forecast your costs. If you have a busy month, your bill can shoot up without warning.

That feels a little backward, doesn't it? At eesel AI, we offer transparent and predictable pricing with zero per-resolution fees. Our plans are based on the features you need and come with a generous monthly interaction allowance, so you can actually celebrate a high-volume month without worrying about the invoice.

Challenge 2: Siloed analytics

As we touched on, Zendesk’s AI analytics live on their own island, separate from main reporting tools like Explore. Your bot's stats are over here, your agent-assist data is over there, and your human agents' KPIs are in yet another place. This makes it a real pain to answer simple but important questions like, "How is our AI impacting our team's first-response time?" without spending an afternoon exporting CSVs and wrestling with spreadsheets.

A single, unified platform solves this. eesel AI plugs right into your helpdesk and gives you one dashboard to see everything. Our actionable reporting doesn't just show you what the AI did; it points out gaps in your knowledge and gives you a clear to-do list for improvement, all in one spot.

Challenge 3: No way to test and forecast

With Zendesk, the only way to really know how your AI will perform is to launch it and cross your fingers. There's no good way to predict your resolution rate or see how much money you might save before you set it loose on your customers. This "build it and see" approach is risky and can easily lead to a bad first impression.

We believe you should be able to test with confidence. eesel AI has a powerful simulation mode that lets you safely test your AI setup on thousands of your own past tickets in a secure sandbox. You can see how it would have responded, fine-tune its logic, and get accurate forecasts on resolution rates and cost savings before a single customer ever chats with it. This lets you roll out your AI gradually and confidently.

A better way to measure and improve AI performance with eesel AI

Getting real, useful insights from your AI requires more than just a dashboard. You need a platform built for transparency, control, and continuous improvement. Here’s how eesel AI addresses the common challenges in older systems and gives you the tools to actually improve your support operations.

Unify knowledge for smarter AI performance

Zendesk's AI is pretty good, but it mainly learns from what's in your help center. If your team's real knowledge is scattered across other places, like internal wikis, shared drives, or documents, the AI can't see it. This leads to more "I don't know" answers and lower resolution rates.

eesel AI can unify your knowledge, instantly. It connects not just to your helpdesk but also to your Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, and can even learn from how your agents solved past tickets. This creates a much smarter AI that gives more accurate answers, which naturally improves every single one of your performance metrics.

Go from insight to action

Zendesk’s reports might tell you there's a hole in your knowledge base, but then it's on you to go fix it. You have to figure out what to write, create a new article, publish it, and hope it works.

Our analytics are built to be acted on. eesel AI can automatically spot successful resolutions from your human agents and generate draft articles for your knowledge base. It helps you fill those information gaps with content that you already know is effective because it’s solved real customer problems before. This creates a powerful, ongoing cycle of improvement.

Gain total control over your AI performance

The rigid automation rules in some platforms can make it hard to start small. You often feel like you have to go all-in at once, which can be daunting.

With eesel AI, you’re in the driver’s seat. Our customizable workflow engine lets you choose exactly which types of tickets the AI should handle. You can start with simple, frequent questions, simulate how the AI will do, and have it safely escalate everything else. As you get comfortable and see the positive impact on your metrics, you can gradually let it handle more.

Go beyond basic Zendesk Advanced AI Performance Metrics and take control

Keeping an eye on your Zendesk Advanced AI performance is a good start, but the platform's metrics often come with strings attached: unpredictable pricing, scattered data, and no way to test without risk. Real improvement isn't just about watching numbers on a screen; it's about having the control to change them for the better. A modern AI platform should give you clear pricing, unified analytics, and safe, powerful tools to improve every single day.

Ready to see what a truly integrated and controllable AI solution can do for your support performance? Try eesel AI for free and see the difference for yourself.