Zendesk Explore: Complete guide to analytics and reporting in 2026

Understanding your customer service data is essential for improving support quality and team performance. But with so many metrics to track across multiple channels, it can be hard to know where to start. That is where Zendesk Explore comes in.

Zendesk Explore is an analytics platform designed specifically for customer service teams. It pulls data from all your Zendesk channels into one place, giving you a complete view of how customers interact with your business. While it is a powerful tool, some teams find it complex to set up and use. If you are looking for a simpler way to get AI-powered insights from your support data, we offer an alternative approach that skips the dashboard building entirely.

Let's break down what Zendesk Explore offers, how it works, and whether it is the right fit for your team.

What is Zendesk Explore?

Zendesk Explore is an analytics and reporting product that helps businesses measure and improve the entire customer experience. It ties together data from every Zendesk channel to give customer experience leaders a complete view of customer interactions.

The product has evolved over time. It started as Zendesk Insights, then became Zendesk Explore, and is now branded as Zendesk Analytics on the main website. The core functionality remains the same: prebuilt dashboards plus the ability to create custom reports tailored to your specific needs.

Explore is built for support leaders, agents, and customer experience teams of all sizes. Whether you are a small business tracking basic ticket metrics or an enterprise analyzing complex omnichannel data, Explore aims to provide the insights you need.

Key features of Zendesk Explore

Prebuilt dashboards

One of Explore's main selling points is that it works out of the box. You get prebuilt dashboards for different Zendesk products without needing an analyst to set them up:

• Support Dashboard: Covers Tickets, Efficiency, Assignee Activity, Agent Updates, Unsolved Tickets, Backlog, Satisfaction, and SLAs
• Talk Dashboard: Tracks Calls, Efficiency, Agent Activity, and Quality metrics
• Guide Dashboard: Monitors Answer Bot performance, Knowledge Capture, Team Publishing, and Knowledge Base usage
• Chat Dashboard: Analyzes Chats, Efficiency, Satisfaction, and Agent Activity
• Live Dashboard: Provides real-time monitoring (available on Enterprise only)

These dashboards give you immediate visibility into your support operations. You can see ticket volume trends, agent performance, customer satisfaction scores, and more without building anything from scratch.

Custom report builder

When prebuilt dashboards are not enough, Explore lets you create custom reports. The report builder includes:

• 500+ customization options
• 20+ visualization types
• Drag-and-drop interface
• Intelligent visualization selector that automatically chooses the best chart type

You build reports by combining metrics (quantitative data like ticket counts) with attributes (qualitative data like agent names or channels). This lets you ask specific questions about your business, such as "Which agents resolved the most tickets last month?" or "What is our average first response time by priority level?"

Data sources and datasets

Explore connects to data from across the Zendesk ecosystem:

• Support Tickets dataset (tickets, updates, users, organizations, backlog history, SLAs)
• Zendesk Talk data
• Zendesk Chat data
• Zendesk Guide data
• Omnichannel routing data
• Custom fields and tags

This means you can analyze support interactions across email, chat, phone, and self-service channels in one place.

Sharing and collaboration

Once you have built dashboards and reports, Explore makes it easy to share insights:

• Schedule dashboard deliveries via email
• Share dashboards with individual agents or groups
• Share dashboards outside Zendesk (with users who do not have Zendesk accounts)
• Export datasets for further analysis
• Bookmark filtered views to save specific dashboard states

Zendesk Explore plans and pricing

Explore comes in three tiers, bundled with different Zendesk Suite plans. You cannot buy Explore as a standalone product; it is included with your Zendesk subscription.

Source: Zendesk pricing and Explore plan documentation

Which plan is right for you?

• Lite works for small teams that just need basic metrics and prebuilt dashboards. The 24-hour data refresh is a limitation, but it covers the essentials.
• Professional suits growing teams that want custom insights. You get faster data refresh (1 hour) and the ability to build custom reports and share dashboards.
• Enterprise is for large organizations that need real-time monitoring and advanced analytics. You get live dashboards, data exports, and the ability to share with external stakeholders.

If you are comparing options, our pricing takes a different approach: we charge per interaction rather than per agent, which can work out more cost-effective for teams of all sizes.

Getting started with Zendesk Explore

Activating Explore

Before you can use Explore, you need to activate it. The process is straightforward:

1. Click the Zendesk Products icon in the top bar
2. Select Analytics
3. Click Activate Explore

Explore then prepares your Zendesk data for reporting. Depending on how many tickets you have, this can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.

User roles and permissions

Explore uses a role-based permission system to control access:

• Admins can create custom reports and dashboards, plus manage viewers and permissions
• Editors can create custom reports and dashboards but cannot manage other users
• Viewers can view and interact with prebuilt and shared dashboards but cannot create or edit anything

You will need to configure these roles before your team can access Explore. This is done through the Admin Center.

Key concepts to understand

To get the most from Explore, you need to understand a few core concepts:

• Dashboards are spaces that present information through widgets (reports, images, text)
• Reports are questions you ask about your business data, displayed as charts or tables
• Datasets are collections of related data from specific Zendesk products
• Metrics are quantitative data points (ticket counts, reply times)
• Attributes are qualitative data you use to slice metrics (agent names, channels, priorities)

Common use cases

Teams typically use Explore to:

• Track ticket volume trends over time
• Monitor individual and team agent performance
• Analyze customer satisfaction scores and feedback
• Identify knowledge gaps (frequent questions that could be answered in your help center)
• Measure SLA compliance and response times

Zendesk Explore limitations and considerations

While Explore is powerful, it is not perfect. Here are some limitations to consider:

Learning curve: Some users find the platform complex. A Reddit discussion titled "Explore platform is too complicated" highlights this concern. The documentation is comprehensive, but it can be overwhelming for new users.

Data refresh intervals: Only Enterprise plans get real-time data. Lite plans refresh every 24 hours, which means you are always looking at yesterday's data. Professional plans refresh every hour.

Plan restrictions: Key features like real-time dashboards, data exports, and external sharing are locked behind the Enterprise tier. If you need these, you are looking at $169 per agent per month minimum.

Migration complexity: If you are moving from the old Insights product to Explore, there is planning involved. The Explore Legacy plan has limitations (no features released after October 2022).

Limited AI capabilities: Explore does not offer native AI-powered insights or recommendations. It is a traditional analytics tool that requires you to build dashboards and interpret the data yourself.

If these limitations are deal-breakers, you might want to explore AI-powered alternatives that provide insights without the complexity.

eesel AI: A simpler approach to support analytics

While Zendesk Explore gives you powerful reporting capabilities, it requires significant setup and ongoing maintenance. You need to build dashboards, configure reports, and manually interpret the data to find insights.

We take a different approach. Instead of making you build dashboards, our AI teammate analyzes your support data automatically and surfaces insights in plain English.

Here is how we compare:

• Automatic topic detection: We analyze your tickets and identify what customers are actually asking about, without you having to configure anything
• Knowledge gap identification: We spot patterns in your tickets and flag topics that should be in your help center but are not
• Natural language reporting: Ask questions like "Show me tickets about refunds this week" and get answers instantly
• No dashboard building: Skip the drag-and-drop interfaces and prebuilt templates. Just connect your help desk and start getting insights

Our AI Agent can also handle frontline support autonomously, while our analytics help you understand what is working and what needs attention. We have written more about using AI for Zendesk analytics and dashboards for support leaders if you want to dig deeper.

Choosing the right analytics approach for your team

So should you use Zendesk Explore or consider an alternative? Here is how to decide.

Zendesk Explore makes sense if:

• You need deep customization and control over your reports
• You are already invested in the Zendesk ecosystem
• You have dedicated analytics resources to build and maintain dashboards
• Real-time monitoring is essential (Enterprise plan)

Consider an alternative if:

• You want AI-powered insights without the setup complexity
• You need faster time-to-value (get insights on day one, not day thirty)
• Your team does not have bandwidth to learn a complex analytics platform
• You prefer asking questions in plain English rather than building dashboards

The key questions to ask before deciding:

1. How quickly do you need actionable insights?
2. Do you have someone who can dedicate time to building and maintaining dashboards?
3. Are you looking for historical reporting, real-time monitoring, or both?
4. Would AI-powered analysis save your team time and surface insights you might miss?

If you are curious about a simpler approach, try eesel AI and see how AI-powered analytics compares to traditional dashboard building.