A practical Zendesk Explore reporting tutorial for support managers

If you're a support manager, you know that the answers to improving your team's performance are hiding somewhere in your data. While gathering those answers can sometimes feel like a full-time job, Zendesk Explore provides the structured, powerful environment needed to simplify that process. It is a feature-rich platform that offers massive potential, and taking a bit of time to master its dashboards will help you see the whole picture with clarity.

This guide is here to help you navigate those features. We'll walk through the essentials of getting started with Zendesk Explore reporting. But more importantly, we’ll look at how to pair standard charts with modern methods to get the kind of insights that actually help improve your customer experience and team efficiency.

What is Zendesk Explore?

Simply put, Zendesk Explore is Zendesk’s dedicated analytics tool. It’s designed to help you measure and make sense of all the activity happening across your Zendesk suite, including Support, Talk, Chat, and Guide.

It’s built around three main ideas:

• Datasets: Think of these as pre-sorted libraries of your information. You’ll have a dataset for tickets, another for agent updates, and so on.

• Reports: These are the individual charts and tables you build to answer a specific question, like "How many tickets did we solve last week?"

• Dashboards: This is where you pull all your reports together to get a high-level view of what’s going on.

It’s a robust tool for digging into historical trends. When you want to complement that data with quick, forward-looking insights-especially as AI changes the support landscape-you might also consider adding specialized AI tools to your workflow.

A step-by-step Zendesk Explore reporting tutorial

Getting your hands dirty in Zendesk Explore is the best way to learn. Once you get your head around how datasets, metrics, and attributes play together, you can start building reports that provide valuable context for your team.

Getting the core concepts: Datasets, metrics, and attributes

Before you build anything, it helps to know what the building blocks are.

• Datasets: This is the library of information you pull from. For most ticket-related questions, you'll use the "Support: Tickets" dataset. If you wanted to see how many times an agent touched a ticket, you'd use "Support: Updates History". Picking the right dataset is the most important first step, and honestly, it gets you most of the way there.

• Metrics: These are the numbers you want to measure. It’s almost always a number, like the count of solved tickets or the average first reply time.

• Attributes: These are the details you use to slice and dice your metrics. Attributes answer questions like "who," "what," or "when." Think ticket status, assignee name, or ticket creation date.

Creating your first report: Tracking solved tickets by agent

Let's try building a simple but useful report to see how this all comes together.

1. From the Explore reports library, click New report and pick the Support: Tickets dataset.

2. In the Metrics panel on the right, click Add, find Solved tickets, and click Apply. Right away, you'll see a single number: the total count of every ticket ever solved.

3. Let's break it down by agent. Click Add in the Columns panel. Search for Assignee name, select it, and hit Apply. Now you have a chart showing who solved what. Much better.

4. Finally, let's make it timely. Click Add in the Filters panel and select Time - Ticket solved. Choose a relevant date range, like "Last 30 days," and you’re good to go.

This process shows the logic involved in manual reporting. You identify which dataset, metric, and attribute you need to combine to get the specific answer you're looking for.

Building a basic dashboard

Once you save your new report, you can pop it into a dashboard to see it alongside other key numbers. In the dashboard builder, you can add your saved report as a widget, move it around, and even add filters that control all the reports on the page at once, like a global date range.

Key support metrics and building a complete picture

Zendesk Explore is excellent at tracking standard, historical data. These numbers are essential for understanding how you've performed, though many managers look for additional tools to help define the path forward.

Essential metrics

Here are a few of the most common KPIs you can (and should) build reports for:

Metric	What it Tells You	Common Use Case
Ticket Volume	The total number of new, solved, and open tickets.	Helps with planning team schedules and spotting busy periods.
First Reply Time (FRT)	The average time it takes an agent to send the first reply.	A good gauge of your team's responsiveness and how long customers wait.
Full Resolution Time	The average time from ticket creation to ticket solved.	Shows your overall efficiency and how complex your tickets are.
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)	The percentage of customers happy with their support.	Measures support quality from the most important perspective: the customer's.

Enhancing your data with AI-driven insights

The metrics above are great for looking at past performance. To complement these, you might also want to explore questions that help you proactively manage your team's efficiency.

While traditional reporting tools focus on historical tallies, modern managers often look to specialized AI tools to answer strategic questions such as:

• Where are our knowledge gaps? What topics are customers asking about that aren't yet documented in our help center?

• What's our real automation potential? Which types of tickets could an AI chatbot handle, and how much time would that save?

• Is our AI even working? If you are using automation, how accurate is it? Where is it handing off to an agent?

Platforms like eesel AI are designed to surface these kinds of insights alongside your Zendesk data. Its reporting dashboard analyzes incoming tickets to show you exactly where your knowledge gaps are and includes a simulation mode to forecast your automation potential accurately.

Maximizing your reporting strategy

Zendesk Explore is a capable and highly customizable tool, but it's helpful to understand its professional-grade focus when planning your reporting strategy.

• It offers professional-level depth. Because it is so flexible and powerful, building advanced reports allows for incredible customization. It's an enterprise-grade system that rewards those who take the time to master its depth. For managers who need instant, self-serve insights, tools like eesel AI can be a great addition to get started quickly.

• Flexible data refresh schedules. Zendesk offers tiered plans that provide different data refresh intervals (from an hour to 24 hours). This is excellent for high-level weekly or monthly reviews, while specific real-time needs might be further enhanced by a complementary live-monitoring tool.

• Ecosystem focus. Explore is optimized for reporting on your extensive Zendesk data. If your team's knowledge also lives in Confluence, Google Docs, or Slack, you might find value in a tool like eesel AI which unifies all your company knowledge in one view.

• A specialist in historical analysis. Explore is a market leader in looking at what has already happened. To test out new strategies-like automating a certain ticket type-you can use eesel AI’s simulation mode to see how an AI would perform on past tickets before going live.

A balanced path to insights

While Zendesk Explore is your go-to gold standard for deep-diving into historical data, eesel AI provides forward-looking answers you can act on today. Together, they offer a complete picture of "what happened" and "what's next."

With eesel AI, you can:

• Get automated insights. Quickly see what your customers are asking about most and where the gaps are in your help center.

• Simulate with confidence. Forecast your automation potential so you can plan your resources effectively.

• See everything in one place. View how your knowledge is performing across all your tools, extending your reporting beyond just Zendesk.

Go beyond reporting and start taking action

Developing your skills in Zendesk Explore is a great way to understand your team's history. The ultimate goal is to use those charts to take quick, informed action. By combining the deep, reliable reporting of Zendesk with the proactive insights of AI, you can spend less time building reports and more time training agents and optimizing your support workflow.

If you're ready to enhance your reporting with proactive, AI-powered insights, see how eesel AI can connect to your Zendesk account. It’s a simple way to get the extra answers you need to truly transform your support.