A practical guide to Zendesk analytics: From operational metrics to strategic insights

Every support team tracks metrics. But let’s be honest, most of us get stuck looking at the same old reports: ticket volume, first response time, and CSAT scores. While those numbers are vital for keeping things running, the truly valuable stuff is usually buried a lot deeper. It’s hidden in the why behind the numbers, often spread across years of unstructured ticket history.

And this is where standard Zendesk analytics can feel like it hits a wall.

This guide will walk you through what you can get out of Zendesk’s native tools and, more importantly, how to boost your analysis with AI to uncover insights that can genuinely help your business.

What is Zendesk analytics?

When people talk about Zendesk analytics, they’re almost always referring to Zendesk’s built-in reporting tool, Zendesk Explore. Its main job is to help you track and visualize key performance indicators (KPIs) for your customer service operations and see how your agents are doing.

It’s built around a few main features:

• Prebuilt dashboards: You get a bunch of out-of-the-box reports for the usual metrics like ticket volume, agent performance, and customer satisfaction (CSAT).

• Custom reports: If you’re on a plan that includes it, you can build your own reports by mixing and matching different metrics to get a more specific view.

• Datasets: These are simply collections of your data from different Zendesk products (like Support and Chat) that you can pull from to create your reports.

• Data sharing: You can schedule reports to be sent out to stakeholders, keeping everyone in the loop without them having to log in.

Think of Zendesk Explore as the dashboard in your car. It’s essential for monitoring the real-time health of your support engine, how fast you’re going, if you’re close to overheating, and if you have enough fuel to get through the day.

The core challenge: Getting strategic insights

The problem isn’t that Zendesk Explore is a bad tool. It’s great for what it was designed to do, which is operational reporting. The real challenge, as many teams discover, is that the most valuable insights aren’t in the numbers it tracks, but in the conversations it stores.

The struggle with unstructured data

Zendesk Explore is fantastic at counting things. It can tell you how many tickets were solved last week, your average CSAT score, and how many customers rated an interaction as "bad." What it can’t easily do is analyze the free-form text within thousands of ticket comments to tell you why those customers were unhappy.

The real gold is in the language your customers use. That’s where you’ll find recurring product bugs, confusing instructions in your help center, brilliant feature requests, and the raw, unfiltered feelings people have about your brand.

One support leader on Reddit described this struggle perfectly when trying to create a smart categorization system from ten years of ticket history. With standard reporting tools, it’s a nearly impossible task because all the important context is locked away in the conversations themselves.

The headache of manual data exports

When faced with this limitation, the next logical step for many is to try and export the data. This is where the real headache begins. As that same Reddit user found out, exporting years of ticket history often leaves you with a massive, unwieldy JSON file. These files are notorious for crashing online converters and are way too big to just copy and paste into a tool like ChatGPT.

This process creates a huge barrier for non-technical managers who just want to find out what’s frustrating their customers. You shouldn’t need a data engineering degree to spot common issues. On top of that, you have to consider the very real data privacy and security risks of uploading raw customer conversations to generic, third-party online tools.

Moving from ‘what’ to ‘why’

This brings us to the main limitation of most built-in analytics tools: they tell you what happened, but they can’t tell you why. A dashboard might show a 5% drop in CSAT last month, but figuring out the reason, a buggy feature release or a confusing new policy, requires manually reading through hundreds of tickets or wrestling with data exports.

This is exactly where modern AI solutions can make a huge difference. Instead of you having to pull data out, the right tools connect directly to your helpdesk and do the heavy lifting for you. For instance, a platform like eesel AI is designed to integrate with Zendesk and train on all of your past tickets, automatically identifying root causes without you lifting a finger.

How to use Zendesk Explore for operational reporting

Before we dive into a better way, it’s important to get the most out of the tools you already have. Using Zendesk Explore effectively for its intended purpose is the first step toward getting your team on the same page with data.

Getting started with Explore

If you’re just beginning, you’ll need to activate Explore and get a handle on the user roles: Admins, Editors, and Viewers. These control who can create reports and who can only view them. For a detailed walkthrough, Zendesk has a pretty good getting started guide that covers the basics.

Key operational metrics to track

Once you’re set up, here are the essential KPIs you should be monitoring with your Zendesk analytics dashboards to keep a pulse on your team’s day-to-day performance:

• First Response Time (FRT): How long does a customer have to wait for that first reply? This one has a big impact on customer satisfaction.

• Average Handle Time (AHT): What’s the average time an agent spends on a ticket from open to close? This is a key metric for efficiency.

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Are customers happy with the support they receive? This is your main measure of how good your interactions are.

• Ticket Volume by Channel: Where are your customers coming from? Knowing if they prefer email, chat, or social media helps you put your people in the right places.

• Resolution Rate: What percentage of tickets are your agents successfully resolving? This helps you understand how effective your team is and where you might need more training.

Keeping an eye on these metrics in Zendesk Explore will give you a solid foundation and help you spot operational issues before they turn into major problems.

Supercharging your analytics with AI

Once you have your operational reporting in a good place, it’s time to go deeper. This is where AI moves you from just monitoring your support team to finding strategic insights that can influence your entire company.

Go beyond dashboards with automated ticket analysis

AI bridges the gap between the numbers and the actual conversations. Instead of just showing you charts, it reads and understands the content of every single ticket, past and present.

This is what makes a tool like eesel AI so useful. It connects to your Zendesk account in a few minutes and immediately starts training on your entire ticket history. It learns your brand’s voice, your common issues, and the solutions that have worked before. The result? It automatically points out trends you’d otherwise miss, like a sudden spike in tickets mentioning a "login error" or a cluster of questions about a new feature, all without you having to build a single report.

Test with confidence and roll out gradually

Adopting a new AI tool can feel like a big step. What if it gives the wrong answers? What if it’s not as smart as it claims to be? You need a way to test it without any risk.

eesel AI was built with this in mind, offering a powerful simulation mode. You can run the AI over thousands of your historical tickets in a completely safe, separate environment. It shows you exactly how it would have categorized issues, what insights it would have found, and can even forecast potential automation rates and cost savings.

This is a world away from competitors that often require a "big bang" launch with little more than a sales demo to go on. With eesel AI, you can see real-world results on your own data and check that it works for you before it ever interacts with a live customer.

A look at eesel AI's simulation mode, which uses historical data to forecast the effectiveness of AI automation on your Zendesk analytics.

From insight to action: Unified knowledge and automated workflows

Insights are only useful if they lead to action. The best AI platforms don’t just tell you what’s wrong; they help you fix it.

The analytics in eesel AI are designed to be actionable. For example, it doesn’t just show you trends; it actively finds gaps in your knowledge base. If the AI sees your agents answering the same question over and over, it can automatically draft a new help center article based on their successful replies. This lets you build out your self-service options with content that’s already proven to work.

From there, you can take things even further. Once the AI identifies all tickets related to "billing," you can use it to build a custom workflow that automatically tags those tickets, routes them to the finance team, and even has an AI Agent send an initial reply. This level of control means the AI works exactly the way you want it to, helping your team instead of just adding another tool to their plate.

This workflow from eesel AI shows how insights from Zendesk analytics can be turned into automated actions, from tagging to routing.

Zendesk analytics pricing

Zendesk Explore, the core of Zendesk analytics, is included in the Zendesk Suite plans. But the features you get really depend on which plan you choose, which is an important thing to keep in mind.

It’s worth noting that key capabilities like building custom reports and getting real-time insights are only available on the higher-tier plans. This might be a reason to consider a more flexible tool like eesel AI, which offers its most powerful analysis and automation features across all its paid plans.

Plan	Price (per agent/month, billed annually)	Key Analytics Features
Suite Team	$55	Prebuilt analytics dashboards, Data exports
Suite Professional	$115	Everything in Team + Customizable reporting, Real-time insights
Suite Enterprise	$169	Everything in Professional + Business rules analysis, Visual data alerts

Stop just counting tickets, start understanding them

Zendesk Explore is an essential tool for monitoring the day-to-day health and performance of your support team. It gives you the operational visibility you need to manage your queues and coach your agents.

But to find the deep, strategic insights that reduce ticket volume, improve your product, and build real customer loyalty, you have to look at the conversations themselves. Doing that manually is next to impossible.

AI is the bridge. It transforms your Zendesk ticket history from a dusty, forgotten archive into a rich, searchable, and active source of business intelligence.

Unlock the story in your support data

Don’t let valuable insights stay buried in old tickets. eesel AI can connect to your Zendesk account and instantly show you the trends, themes, and knowledge gaps hidden in your customer conversations.

Sign up and run a free, no-risk simulation on your historical tickets to see what you’ve been missing.