The ultimate guide to Zendesk BI tools in 2025

Your Zendesk account is packed with customer data. Every single ticket tells a story about what your customers need, where your product has issues, and how your agents are performing. But just having all that data sitting there doesn't do much good. To actually make your customer service better, you have to dig in and understand it.

This is where Business Intelligence (BI) tools enter the picture.

But picking the right tool can feel overwhelming. Do you stick with what Zendesk gives you out of the box? Do you wrangle a heavy-duty platform like Power BI? Or is there another way? This guide will break down the options for you, comparing what they can do, where they fall short, and what they cost, so you can start turning your Zendesk data into a real advantage.

What are Zendesk BI tools?

So, what exactly are Zendesk BI tools? In short, they're apps that help you grab, sort through, and visualize all your support data so you can spot patterns you'd otherwise miss.

The idea is to get past just counting tickets and start figuring out the "why" behind the numbers. Like, why does customer satisfaction dip on weekends? Or what kind of tickets are bogging your team down the most?

These tools usually come in two flavors:

1. Native Reporting: The analytics tools that are already built into Zendesk.

2. External BI Platforms: Separate, more powerful tools like Power BI, Tableau, or SquaredUp that you connect to Zendesk and other apps.

We’ll look at both of these, plus a third, AI-first option that’s less about looking at charts and more about getting things done.

Option 1: Native Zendesk BI tools - Zendesk Explore

Zendesk Explore is the platform's own analytics tool. It's the default choice for most teams because, well, it's right there. It makes sense, you want to understand your support data, and there's a tool inside the platform you already use every day.

Features and capabilities

Zendesk Explore gives you a set of pre-built dashboards for the usual stuff: ticket volume, first response time, agent productivity, and so on. You can also build your own reports, click into specific tickets, and keep an eye on some metrics as they happen.

The pros: Why teams start here

• It’s built-in: There's no setup to worry about. It’s already part of your Zendesk account and ready to go.

• User-friendly dashboards: The ready-made dashboards are great for a quick health check on your support operations without needing a data analyst.

• Made for Zendesk: All the metrics and reports are designed specifically for support teams using Zendesk.

The cons: Common limitations and frustrations

While Explore is a decent starting point, it doesn't take long for many teams to feel a bit boxed in. As users in the Zendesk community forums point out, it can feel "too static and difficult to work with" when you need to ask more complex questions.

The main frustrations usually boil down to these:

• Limited Customization: Trying to build a truly custom report can feel clunky and has a surprisingly steep learning curve.

• Data Silos: It’s tough to mix your Zendesk data with information from other places, like your CRM or sales tools. This makes getting a full picture of the customer journey nearly impossible.

• Sharing Restrictions: Sharing your findings with people outside of your Zendesk user list is a hassle, which makes it hard to keep the rest of the company in the loop.

Option 2: Connecting to external BI tools like Power BI

When Zendesk Explore starts to feel like a bottleneck, the next logical step for many teams is a full-blown BI platform like Microsoft Power BI. These tools are built for serious data analysis across your entire business.

Why use external BI tools? The need for deeper analytics

The biggest reason to use an external tool is to pull all your data into one place. With something like Power BI, you can mix your Zendesk ticket data with sales figures from Salesforce, website traffic from Google Analytics, and payment info from Shopify. This lets you answer much bigger questions, like "How much does a slow first-response time actually cost us in customer lifetime value?"

The typical setup process for external BI tools

Heads up, getting your Zendesk data flowing into Power BI isn't a simple plug-and-play setup. It's more of a project. You typically have to build a data pipeline, which is a job for someone with technical skills. The process often involves using an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool like Stitch or Panoply to pull data from Zendesk, clean it up, and send it to a data warehouse (like Snowflake). From there, you can finally connect Power BI to the warehouse and start building reports.

The pros: What you gain with external BI tools like Power BI

• You can connect everything: Pull in data from virtually any source in your business to get a complete view.

• Advanced analytics: You can do some seriously complex data modeling, build predictive reports, and create slick, interactive dashboards.

• Flexible sharing: It's easy to share reports with anyone in the company or embed them in your internal wikis.

The cons of external BI tools: The hidden complexities and costs

But for all its power, this route has some serious catches:

• High technical barrier: You'll almost certainly need a data analyst or engineer to set this up and keep it running smoothly.

• Delayed insights: As mentioned, most of these setups don't give you real-time data, which can be a dealbreaker for support teams who need to react quickly.

• Multiple costs: You're not just paying for a Power BI license. You also have to pay for the ETL tool and the data warehouse, and those costs can pile up fast.

Option 3: Bypassing traditional BI tools with an AI-native approach

Traditional BI tools are fantastic for analyzing what's already happened. But what if you could use that data to fix problems as they're happening, or even before? An AI-native approach is less about building manual reports and more about using AI to provide useful insights and automation right inside your daily workflow.

Moving from retroactive analysis to real-time action

Instead of spending half a day building a dashboard to figure out which tickets you could have automated last week, what if an AI could look at your ticket history, find those patterns for you, and just start resolving them today?

This is where a different approach, using a tool like eesel AI, comes into play. It connects with Zendesk and your other knowledge sources not just to show you data, but to help you automate responses, route tickets, and give agents a hand.

How eesel AI turns Zendesk data into automated resolutions

The insights you get from eesel AI are instantly useful because they're tied directly to an automation engine.

• Train on past tickets: Forget manually tagging tickets for trends. eesel AI automatically learns from thousands of your past resolved tickets. It figures out your common issues and even your brand's tone of voice from day one.

A screenshot showing how eesel AI can be trained on past Zendesk tickets to learn a company's support history and tone of voice.

• Powerful simulation mode: Stop guessing what the impact will be. eesel AI can run a simulation on thousands of your historical tickets. This gives you a clear forecast of how many tickets it could automate and how much you could save before you even turn it on.

The eesel AI simulation dashboard, a powerful alternative to traditional Zendesk BI tools, forecasting automation impact on historical tickets.

• Actionable reporting: The analytics dashboard doesn't just show you numbers. It points out gaps in your help docs and identifies new trends, giving you a clear to-do list for improving both your AI and your self-service options.

The eesel AI analytics dashboard identifies knowledge gaps, offering actionable insights beyond what standard Zendesk BI tools provide.

Comparing the setup: Minutes vs. months

While setting up a big BI tool can take a data team weeks or even months, eesel AI is designed to be incredibly simple to set up. You can connect your help desk, add your knowledge sources, and get going in minutes. It fits into your current workflow without forcing you to rip everything out and start over.

Pricing and plans compared

Cost is obviously a huge piece of the puzzle. Here’s a quick look at how the options compare.

Zendesk Suite pricing

Zendesk’s reporting features are bundled into its Suite plans. The more powerful features are generally kept for the more expensive tiers.

(Pricing from Zendesk's official page as of late 2024.)

The true cost of external BI tools like Power BI

Power BI's sticker price of around $10 per user per month is just the beginning. The real cost includes:

• ETL Tool: Services like Stitch or Fivetran can run from hundreds to thousands of dollars a month.

• Data Warehouse: Storing your data in a platform like Snowflake or Google BigQuery adds another usage-based bill.

• Implementation/Analyst Time: Don't forget the salary for the technical expert you'll need to manage all of this.

eesel AI's transparent pricing

eesel AI offers straightforward pricing based on features and usage. A big plus is there are no per-resolution fees, so you aren't penalized for automating more.

A screenshot of the eesel AI pricing page, showing its transparent, feature-based plans as an alternative to complex Zendesk BI tools pricing.

This clear model helps you avoid the surprise bills that can come with other AI tools and the complicated, multi-vendor costs of a traditional BI project.

Which Zendesk BI tools approach is right for your team?

So, which tool is the right one for your team? It really boils down to what you're trying to accomplish.

If you just need some basic, out-of-the-box reports on your Zendesk activity, Zendesk Explore is a perfectly fine place to start. If your company already has a data team and a need for deep, company-wide analysis, then a powerful external BI tool like Power BI is a solid choice, as long as you're prepared for the complexity.

But if your main goal is to not just look at the past but to actively make your team more efficient in the future, an AI-native tool like eesel AI offers the most direct path from seeing a problem to solving it automatically.

Start turning insights into action

Ready to tap into the power of your Zendesk data without getting bogged down by complicated BI tools? With eesel AI, you can go from data to automated resolutions in a matter of minutes.

Start your free trial with eesel AI today.