Your complete guide to choosing a Zendesk reporting tool in 2025

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 what's slowing you down. It’s the difference between guessing what to do next and actually knowing.

But finding the right Zendesk reporting tool can feel like a massive chore. You need something that does more than just give you a backward glance at last month's ticket count. You need insights that help you make things better right now.

In this guide, we'll walk through Zendesk's own reporting tools, take an honest look at what they do well and where they fall short, and introduce a more modern, AI-powered way to turn your data from a simple report card 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 actually understand and act on.

The main player here is Zendesk Explore, the platform's built-in analytics tool. It’s made to pull data directly from your Zendesk account and pop it into dashboards for you.

While Explore is the native option, a lot of teams eventually start looking around for something else. Why? Because their needs get more complicated. They might hit a wall with Explore's limitations or, more often, they realize they need to pull in data from other places to see the whole picture.

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

• First Response Time (FRT): How long are customers waiting for that first "hello"?

• Average Resolution Time: From the moment a ticket is opened to "problem solved," how long does it take?

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

• Ticket Volume by Channel: Are people emailing, chatting, or calling? Where is the action happening?

• Agent Performance: Who’s knocking it out of the park, and who might need a bit of extra coaching?

A deep dive into Zendesk Explore's features

To be fair, Zendesk Explore is a pretty capable tool, especially if your team’s entire world revolves around the Zendesk ecosystem. It gives you a decent starting point for understanding your support data without immediately having to shop for another tool.

Pre-built dashboards and reports

Straight out of the box, Explore gives you a bunch of pre-made dashboards for Zendesk products like Support, Talk, Chat, and Guide. This is great for getting up and running quickly. Within minutes, you can get a bird's-eye view of your ticket volume, agent activity, and CSAT scores.

These dashboards are built around common metrics, which is handy. The only catch? If you're on a lower-tier plan, these dashboards are read-only. You can look, but you can't touch. If you want to customize a report or dig a little deeper into the numbers, you'll likely need to pull out the credit card and upgrade.

Custom reporting and datasets

For those on the right plan and with a bit of extra time, Explore does let you build your own custom reports. It all works on a system of datasets, metrics, and attributes.

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

• Metrics are the numbers you care about (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 gives you a lot of flexibility, it also comes with a pretty steep learning curve. Building a custom report to answer a specific question isn't always a simple drag-and-drop process. It often means getting cozy with Explore’s query builder, which can feel more like a tool for data analysts than for the support managers who actually need the answers.

Zendesk Explore: Pricing and plans

The reporting features you get are tied directly to your Zendesk Suite plan. This is a big deal, because what you can do expands a lot as you go up the pricing ladder. Things that might seem basic, like getting real-time data or sharing a dashboard with someone outside your team, are often locked away in more expensive plans.

Here’s a quick look at what you get at each level:

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 power to create your own reports and get fresh data only starts at the Professional level, and even then, sharing is pretty restricted.

The limitations of a traditional Zendesk reporting tool

Even with a tool as solid as Zendesk Explore, many support leaders find themselves hitting a wall. The issues aren't always with the tool itself, but with the whole dashboard-first approach to reporting.

Data silos and limited integrations

Zendesk Explore does a great job of analyzing data that lives inside Zendesk. But what about all the important info that lives everywhere else? Support today isn't just about tickets. The real answers are often scattered across your Confluence pages, Google Docs, Notion wikis, and old Slack threads.

When your reporting tool can’t see that other information, you’re flying blind. You might see that a ticket took forever to resolve, but you can't see that the agent spent an hour digging through three different documents to find the right answer. The full story gets lost between these disconnected systems.

This is where modern AI platforms come in. A tool like eesel AI doesn't just connect to your Zendesk account; it also integrates with over 100 other apps your team already uses. This gives you a complete view of your entire support world, all in one spot.

This infographic illustrates how an advanced Zendesk reporting tool like eesel AI can overcome data silos by integrating with multiple knowledge sources.

Complexity and a steep learning curve

We touched on this earlier, but trying to build custom reports in Explore can feel like taking on a second job. This complexity creates a real bottleneck. A support manager might have a great idea for a report that could uncover a major customer frustration, but they have to submit a request and wait for a data analyst to build it. By the time the report is ready, the opportunity to fix the problem might have already passed.

In contrast, the best new tools are built for you to use yourself. With eesel AI, you can connect your helpdesk and knowledge sources in a few clicks and get going in minutes, not months. There's no waiting around for developers or analysts to get the insights you need to make your team better.

Reactive vs. proactive insights

This might be the biggest limitation of them all. Traditional dashboards are, by their very nature, reactive. They’re fantastic at telling you what happened last week or last month. They can show you that your CSAT score dipped or that your response time crept up.

But they can't tell you why.

A report might show a spike in tickets about "billing issues," but it won't tell you the root cause is a single confusing sentence on your pricing page. Dashboards are great at flagging problems after they've already happened, but they don't give you a clear path to preventing them in the future. This is the exact problem that AI-driven tools are designed to fix.

Beyond dashboards: Using AI for your Zendesk reporting tool

Instead of seeing AI as just another way to build a dashboard, think of it as an intelligence layer that sits on top of all your data and helps you figure out what to do next. This is where a platform like eesel AI really shines, helping you move from just tracking numbers to actually improving them.

Simulate performance before you go live

One of the scariest parts of rolling out a new tool, especially an AI one, is the risk. What if it gives bad answers? What if it frustrates customers? Traditional reporting tools can't help you there; you just have to launch it and cross your fingers.

With eesel AI's simulation mode, you can test everything safely first. It runs your AI setup on thousands of your own past tickets in a private sandbox. You get accurate, data-backed predictions on how many tickets it could have solved, see exactly how the AI would have responded, and get a clear idea of cost savings before a single customer ever interacts with it. It’s all about moving forward with confidence, not just hoping for the best.

The eesel AI simulation dashboard allows you to test the effectiveness of your AI Zendesk reporting tool on historical data before going live.

Automatically find and fill knowledge gaps

A great reporting tool shouldn't just show you data; it should show you what's missing. The eesel AI analytics dashboard is designed to do just that. It doesn't only track resolved tickets; it highlights the most common questions your customers are asking that your current help articles can't answer.

This is where it gets really cool. With its "Automated knowledge base generation" feature, eesel AI can look at successful ticket resolutions from your human agents and automatically turn them into draft articles for your knowledge base. It finds the holes in your help content and then helps you patch them with proven answers. This creates a really positive loop: your team solves a problem, the AI learns from it, and that knowledge is ready to help the next customer.

The eesel AI analytics dashboard identifies knowledge gaps, a key feature of a proactive Zendesk reporting tool.

Here’s how that works in practice:

1. A customer asks a new or tricky question.

2. The AI sees it doesn't have a solid answer in the knowledge base and passes the ticket to a human agent.

3. Your agent provides a clear, helpful solution.

4. eesel AI analyzes that successful conversation.

5. It then automatically creates a draft article based on the agent's reply, ready for you to quickly review and publish.

Get total control with a workflow engine

Insights are only useful if you can do something with them. Once eesel AI’s reporting flags a trend, you can immediately use its simple, customizable workflow engine to handle it.

Let's say you see a sudden increase in questions about a new feature. You can instantly set up the AI to handle those specific questions. You get full control to decide exactly which tickets the AI takes on, define its tone of voice to match your brand, and even create custom actions. For instance, you can let the AI look up order information in Shopify, tag tickets for your product team, or route really complex issues to a senior agent. This closes the gap between seeing a problem and actually solving it.

This diagram shows how a workflow engine in an advanced Zendesk reporting tool can automate responses and actions by integrating directly with your helpdesk.

Move from a Zendesk reporting tool to resolution

Zendesk Explore is a perfectly fine starting point for any team needing to get a handle on its support data. If your operations are straightforward and live entirely within Zendesk, its pre-built dashboards and custom reports can tell you a lot.

But if you want to see the complete picture and shift from reacting to problems to proactively preventing them, you'll need something more. Modern teams need a tool that brings together knowledge from every source, gets rid of the headache of building custom reports, and delivers AI-driven insights you can actually use.

The goal isn't just to have prettier dashboards. It's to build a faster, smarter, and more helpful customer experience. The right reporting tool doesn't just show you the score; it helps you win the game.

Your next steps with a Zendesk reporting tool

• Ready to find out what your data is really trying to tell you? eesel AI plugs into your existing tools and gives you actionable insights in minutes.

• Start a free trial to simulate performance on your own historical tickets and see exactly what you can automate.