Your complete guide to choosing a Zendesk reporting tool in 2026

Let’s be honest, good customer support runs on good data. The right reports don't just throw numbers at you; they tell you a story about what your customers need, where your team shines, and how you can optimize your workflow. It’s the difference between guessing what to do next and actually knowing.

Choosing the right Zendesk reporting tool is a key step in professionalizing your support operations. You want something that provides a comprehensive look at your team's success while offering insights that help you make things even better right now.

In this guide, we'll walk through Zendesk's own robust reporting tools, highlight what they do exceptionally well, and introduce a modern, AI-powered way to complement your data and turn your reports into a playbook for success.

What is a Zendesk reporting tool?

At its heart, a Zendesk reporting tool is all about measuring and making sense of the key metrics that matter to your customer service team. It’s the system you use to translate a mountain of raw data from tickets, chats, and calls into something you can clearly understand and act on.

The main player here is Zendesk Explore, the platform's built-in analytics tool. It’s a mature, reliable platform designed to pull data directly from your Zendesk account and present it in intuitive dashboards.

While Explore is the powerful native option, many teams choose to add complementary tools as their needs evolve. This is often because they want to pull in data from other specialized platforms to see an even broader picture of their customer journey.

A good reporting tool helps you keep an eye on the essentials, like:

• First Response Time (FRT): How quickly is your team connecting with customers?

• Average Resolution Time: From the moment a ticket is opened to "problem solved," how efficient is the process?

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Are people happy with the high-quality help they're getting?

• Ticket Volume by Channel: Are people emailing, chatting, or calling? Where can you best allocate your resources?

• Agent Performance: Who’s leading the way, and who might benefit from extra professional development?

A deep dive into Zendesk Explore's features

Zendesk Explore is a very capable and impressive tool, especially as it is purpose-built for the Zendesk ecosystem. It gives you a strong, professional starting point for understanding your support data without needing to immediately look for external software.

Pre-built dashboards and reports

Straight out of the box, Explore provides several pre-made dashboards for Zendesk products like Support, Talk, Chat, and Guide. This is excellent for getting up and running quickly. Within minutes, you can get a professional view of your ticket volume, agent activity, and CSAT scores.

These dashboards are built around essential industry metrics, which is incredibly handy. To ensure every team has what they need, Zendesk offers these as a foundational feature, with higher-tier plans offering even more flexibility to customize and edit these reports as your strategy becomes more complex.

Custom reporting and datasets

For teams on professional plans, Explore offers the power to build your own custom reports. It’s a sophisticated system built on datasets, metrics, and attributes.

• Datasets are organized buckets of your Zendesk data (like all your ticket info or user profiles).

• Metrics are the key numbers you track (like the count of solved tickets or average reply time).

• Attributes are the filters you use to slice up your data (like agent names, ticket channels, or priority levels).

While this setup provides immense flexibility for data-driven teams, it is a professional-grade tool that rewards those who take the time to learn its deep capabilities. It’s a powerful environment for managers who want to act as their own data analysts.

Zendesk Explore: Pricing and plans

The reporting features you get are designed to scale with your Zendesk Suite plan. This tiered approach is great because it means you only pay for the complexity you need, unlocking more power as your team grows. Features like real-time data or advanced dashboard sharing are available as you move into enterprise-ready tiers.

Here’s a look at the features available at different levels in 2026:

Feature	Suite Team ($55/agent/mo)	Suite Professional ($115/agent/mo)	Suite Enterprise ($169/agent/mo)
Prebuilt Dashboards	Yes	Yes	Yes
Custom Reporting	No	Yes	Yes
Data Refresh Rate	24 hours	1 hour	Real-time (for live dashboards)
Dashboard Sharing	No	Zendesk users only	Zendesk users and end-users
Live Dashboards	No	Default view	Customizable views
Custom Roles & Permissions	No	No	Yes

As you can see, the ability to create bespoke reports and access more frequent data refreshes is a standard part of the Professional and Enterprise experience.

Considerations for a traditional Zendesk reporting tool

Even with a platform as mature as Zendesk Explore, support leaders often look for ways to expand their analytics. Often, this isn't about the tool itself, but about a desire to integrate even more data sources into their decision-making process.

Managing data across platforms

Zendesk Explore is world-class at analyzing data within the Zendesk ecosystem. However, support teams often use a variety of tools. The complete picture may include information from Confluence pages, Google Docs, Notion wikis, or Slack threads.

To get the broadest possible view, some teams choose to use complementary AI platforms. A tool like eesel AI is designed to work alongside Zendesk, integrating with over 100 other apps to provide a unified view of your knowledge sources alongside your ticketing data.

Professional-grade power and customization

As we mentioned, Explore is a powerful tool with many features. For teams that want to move even faster without needing specialized data training, complementary options can help. eesel AI, for example, allows you to connect your helpdesk and knowledge sources quickly, providing a user-friendly way for any support manager to gain insights immediately.

Enhancing reactive data with proactive insights

Traditional dashboards are excellent at showing you exactly what happened in the past. They provide the "what"-like a dip in CSAT or an increase in volume.

To find the "why" even faster, many teams are turning to AI.

While a report might show a trend in "billing issues," AI-driven tools can help pinpoint the exact root cause-like a specific sentence in a guide-allowing you to proactively fix the source of the tickets. This is a great way to build on the foundation Zendesk provides.

Beyond dashboards: Using AI to complement your Zendesk reporting tool

Think of AI as an intelligence layer that works with your Zendesk data to suggest your next best move. Platforms like eesel AI are designed to be a powerful addition to your setup, helping you turn numbers into active improvements.

Simulate performance for confident rollouts

When you're ready to try new automation or reporting strategies, it's great to have a way to test them. While standard tools show you past results, eesel AI's simulation mode lets you look forward. It runs your setup against thousands of past tickets in a sandbox, giving you data-backed predictions on performance and potential cost savings. It’s a great way to move forward with full confidence in your strategy.

Automatically identify and fill knowledge gaps

A modern reporting strategy should help you see where your help center could be even stronger. The eesel AI analytics dashboard complements Zendesk by highlighting questions that your current articles don't yet cover.

Even better, its "Automated knowledge base generation" feature can take successful resolutions from your human agents and turn them into draft articles for your knowledge base. This creates a positive cycle where the AI learns from your team's best work, ensuring your knowledge base is always growing and improving.

Here’s how that works:

1. A customer asks a unique or complex question.

2. The system identifies that the answer isn't in the current knowledge base and routes it to an agent.

3. Your professional agent provides an excellent solution.

4. eesel AI analyzes the successful interaction.

5. It automatically creates a draft article based on that reply, which you can then review and publish to help future customers.

Customize your results with a workflow engine

Insights are most powerful when you can act on them. When your reporting flags a trend, you can use a customizable workflow engine to address it.

If you see a trend in questions about a specific feature, you can set the AI to help with those topics specifically. You have total control over the AI's tone and actions, whether it's looking up info in Shopify, tagging tickets for product teams, or ensuring complex issues reach your most experienced agents.

Moving from reporting to resolution

Zendesk Explore is an industry-leading tool and a fantastic starting point for any team. Its pre-built dashboards and deep reporting capabilities provide a solid foundation for any professional support organization.

For teams that want to take their data strategy even further, adding complementary AI tools can help you see the complete picture across all your apps. This combination allows you to shift from tracking metrics to proactively building a faster, smarter customer experience.

The best reporting strategy doesn't just track the score-it gives you the tools to succeed.

Your next steps with a Zendesk reporting tool

• Ready to see how AI can enhance your Zendesk data? eesel AI integrates seamlessly to give you actionable insights quickly.

• Start a free trial to run a simulation on your historical tickets and see how you can further optimize your support today.

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