A practical guide to Zendesk reporting analytics

If you work in customer support, you know that data isn't just a bunch of numbers on a dashboard. It’s the story of your customers and your team. Good reporting helps you see what's really going on, manage your team’s workload, and, hopefully, make your service a whole lot better. Most teams using Zendesk lean on its built-in tools for this, but let's be honest, getting from a mountain of data to a clear, actionable insight can feel like a chore.

This guide will walk you through Zendesk reporting analytics in a no-nonsense way. We’ll look at the main tool, Zendesk Explore, from its simple, ready-made dashboards to its more powerful custom reporting. We'll also get real about its limitations and explore a more modern way to turn your support data into an actual plan for improvement.

What is Zendesk reporting analytics?

Simply put, Zendesk reporting and analytics is all about using Zendesk’s own tools to measure and track how your customer service is performing. The main player here is Zendesk Explore, the analytics platform built to give you a window into your support world.

Zendesk Explore pulls in data from all your Zendesk products (Support, Talk, Chat, Guide, you name it) and lets you do a few key things:

• Keep an eye on key metrics: You can track the usual suspects like first response time (FRT), resolution time, and customer satisfaction (CSAT).

• See how the team is doing: You can check in on how individual agents or specific groups are performing, seeing where they’re crushing it and where they might need a hand.

• Figure out your customers: You can spot common problems, find out when everyone is trying to contact you at once, and see which channels people prefer.

Explore is pretty powerful, but at its heart, it's a traditional analytics tool. It’s fantastic at telling you what happened, but it often leaves it up to you to spend hours figuring out why it happened and what on earth you’re supposed to do about it.

Understanding the core components of Zendesk reporting analytics

Zendesk Explore has a few different layers to it, designed for everyone from the manager who needs a quick glance to the data analyst who wants to dive deep. Let's break down the main parts.

Pre-built dashboards: Your starting point

Right out of the box, Zendesk gives you a bunch of pre-built dashboards. These cover the most common metrics for channels like email, chat, and phone support. They’re a decent way to get a quick feel for your team's performance without having to build anything yourself.

A screenshot of the Zendesk Support Analytics dashboard, which provides pre-built reports on key customer service metrics.

You'll find dashboards for:

• Support: This tracks things like ticket volume, agent activity, and whether you're meeting your SLAs.

• Talk: Here you can monitor call volume, how long customers are waiting, and agent availability.

• Guide: This one measures how your help center is doing, including article views and what customers are searching for.

The catch? These dashboards can be pretty rigid. On the lower-priced plans, they're often read-only, so you can't tweak them to show the metrics that actually matter to your business. They give you a nice, high-level picture, but often just lead to more questions.

Custom reports: Unlocking granular insights

For teams that need more, Zendesk Explore lets you build your own custom reports and dashboards. This is where you can really start digging. You can create reports from scratch to answer very specific questions, like figuring out how CSAT scores change by product line or tracking resolution times for your VIP customers.

To get started with custom reports, you have to get your head around three main ideas:

1. Datasets: These are just bundles of your Zendesk data (like Support tickets or Guide articles). You have to pick the right one before you can do anything else.

2. Metrics: These are the numbers you want to measure, like the number of tickets solved or the average first reply time.

3. Attributes: These are the labels you use to slice up your data, like by agent name, ticket channel, or priority.

This flexibility is great, but it comes with a pretty steep learning curve. The interface can feel clunky, and building a report that actually tells you something useful often means you need to know the data structure inside and out. A lot of teams find they either need a dedicated data person or have to invest in some serious training to make it worthwhile.

AI and omnichannel analytics: A fragmented view

Zendesk has also rolled out dashboards for its AI tools and omnichannel routing. These reports are meant to help you track how your AI agents are doing, measure deflection rates, and see what's happening across all your support channels in one place.

While this sounds good, the insights are often disconnected. For example, your AI agent dashboard might tell you a bot couldn't solve a customer's problem, but it won't tell you why. Was the help center article it pulled from confusing? Is there a big gap in your documentation? To connect those dots, you have to manually dig around and switch between different reports. This fragmented view makes it tough to build a solid strategy for getting better.

Zendesk reporting analytics pricing: What you get at each tier

Your access to Zendesk's reporting tools really depends on which subscription plan you’re on. The more advanced stuff is usually locked away in the pricier tiers, which can be a real issue for growing teams.

Here’s a general idea of how the reporting features are split across the Zendesk Suite plans:

Feature	Suite Team ($55/agent/mo)	Suite Professional ($115/agent/mo)	Suite Enterprise ($169/agent/mo)
Prebuilt Dashboards	✓	✓	✓
Data Refresh Rate	24 hours	1 hour	1 hour (Real-time for live dashboards)
Custom Reports	✗	✓	✓
Dashboard Sharing	✗	Internal users only	Internal & external users
Live Dashboards	✗	Default view only	Customizable views
Business Rules Analysis	✗	✗	✓
Custom Agent Roles	✗	✗	✓

Pricing is based on annual billing as of late 2024. For the most up-to-date info, you should check out the official Zendesk pricing page.

As you can see, key features like custom reporting and faster data refreshes don't even kick in until you're on the Suite Professional plan. This means teams on the entry-level plan are flying half-blind. This pricing structure can make it pretty expensive to get the insights you need to grow your support operations.

A better approach: From tracking metrics to driving action with AI

Zendesk reporting is pretty good at showing you what already happened. But what if your analytics could tell you what to do right now? That's the idea behind a more modern AI platform like eesel AI. Instead of just handing you dashboards, eesel AI gives you clear, actionable insights that help you make your support better, day after day.

An illustration of eesel AI's copilot drafting a reply within the Zendesk interface, showcasing how it provides actionable assistance rather than just data.

Here’s how it offers a smarter way to handle things:

• It actually finds gaps in your knowledge. Zendesk can tell you how your AI agent is performing, but eesel AI's analytics take it a step further. It looks at conversations where the AI got stuck and automatically points out what's missing from your help center. It can even take a human agent's successful reply and turn it into a draft article, giving you a super clear path to improving your self-service.

• You can see the future (sort of). Before you even switch on any automation, eesel AI has a simulation mode that can chew through thousands of your past tickets. It then gives you a detailed forecast of how many tickets you could automate, how much you'd save, and where your AI is likely to shine or stumble. It’s a level of predictive insight that Zendesk's historical reports just can't match.

• It’s surprisingly easy to set up. Getting started with eesel AI takes just a few minutes. It connects to your Zendesk account in one click and starts learning from your existing tickets, macros, and help center. You don't need a complicated setup process or a long training course to get valuable information. You can set it all up yourself without having to get on a sales call.

• Pricing that makes sense. eesel AI has simple, straightforward pricing that doesn't charge you per resolution. That means you can scale up your automation without worrying about a shocking bill at the end of the month. Unlike Zendesk, which hides its best analytics behind expensive enterprise plans, powerful reporting is just part of the core eesel AI platform.

While traditional reporting just gives you metrics, an actionable insights platform helps you create a cycle of constant improvement. Instead of a manager having to hunt through data to find problem areas, the system automatically flags knowledge gaps from your support conversations and suggests new content to fix them.

This video provides a helpful introduction to the core concepts of Zendesk reporting analytics and how to use its tools.

Final thoughts on Zendesk reporting analytics

Having solid Zendesk reporting analytics is a must for any support team today. Zendesk Explore gives you a decent starting point with its pre-built dashboards and custom reports. But its complexity, confusing pricing tiers, and disconnected views can make it a real challenge to turn all that data into action.

For teams that want to do more than just look at charts, platforms like eesel AI offer a much smarter path forward. By giving you actionable insights, predictive forecasts, and a dead-simple user experience, you can spend less time staring at reports and more time actually making your customer experience better.

Ready to see what your support data is really trying to tell you? Try eesel AI today.