Introduction

In Part 1, we focused on making the most of Zendesk’s pre-built reporting capabilities. Now, let’s look at creating custom reports—an essential step for tailoring your analytics to your organization’s unique needs. Custom reporting might sound daunting at first, but with the right approach, it’s both manageable and rewarding.

Why Custom Reports Matter

Pre-built dashboards are great for general insights, but every organization has specific questions that off-the-shelf reports can’t answer. Custom reports allow you to:

• Track niche metrics specific to your industry or goals (e.g. reporting on custom ticket fields)
• Combine data points for deeper analysis
• Present data in ways that resonate most with your stakeholders

For example, I often work with clients that need to measure ticket escalations by issue type—a metric that isn’t available on any default dashboard. With a custom report, we can easily isolate these tickets and identify patterns, leading to targeted training for agents, suggestions for automations and a sharp drop in escalations.

This is also where custom reports can become truly impressive. By reporting on common issue types, using a custom ticket field based on your organization’s needs, you not only gather insights on your CS operations but also your wider business operations, allowing you to inform other departments of trends they may otherwise be unaware of.

Best Practices for Building Custom Reports

Start With a Clear Question

The key to effective custom reporting is knowing exactly what you want to find out. A vague idea like “How are we doing?” will lead to messy reports. Instead, frame your question narrowly, such as “What’s the average resolution time for high-priority tickets over the last quarter?”

Think about the decisions you’ll make based on the data. Reports are only as useful as the actions they inspire. For instance, if your goal is to improve resolution times, you’ll want metrics and attributes that can break down bottlenecks and agent performance.

Use Explore’s Report builder

Explore’s Report builder is where the magic happens. Follow these steps to get started:

1. Select Your Dataset: Choose a dataset that aligns with your goal (e.g., Support, Guide, or Talk).
2. Pick Your Metrics: These are the data points you want to measure, such as Ticket Count or CSAT Score.
3. Add Attributes: Attributes break your metrics down into categories, like agent names or ticket priority levels.
4. Apply Filters: Narrow your results to specific timeframes, teams, or ticket types.

This is the crucial part: Keep your query simple at first. You can always add layers of complexity later, but a clean, focused report is easier to interpret and refine. Just as mentioned in the previous article, adding one element at a time allows you to see the impact each has on your report.

Tip! I recommend always having a date filter turned on initially, otherwise your report will try to calculate results for all time, which could be hundreds of thousands or even millions of tickets!

Combine Metrics for Advanced Insights

One of my favorite features of Explore is the ability to combine metrics. For example, I’ve created reports that measure agent performance by combining ticket resolution times with satisfaction scores. This allows me to see which agents are resolving tickets quickly without compromising quality—a key balance for any support team.

Another powerful use case is trend analysis. By combining ticket creation and resolution metrics over time, you can identify patterns that might indicate staffing needs or process inefficiencies among certain ticket categories.

Choose the Right Visualization

The way you present data can make or break your report’s effectiveness. Here’s a quick cheat sheet:

• Line Charts: Ideal for trends over time
• Pie Charts: Great for proportions but don’t overuse them
• Bar Charts: Perfect for comparisons
• Tables: Best for detailed data that stakeholders may want to explore further .Tables are also the go to when you first start building your report as they allow you to see the underlying data before you turn your report into a chart. For example, If your bar chart doesn’t look right, turn it into a table first to see how Zendesk is computing your data.

Here’s an example of a chart that isn’t quite displaying right:

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See how we’re not really able to see much data at once, in any useful way? Practice my tip above and switch the chart type from bar chart to table:

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Eureka! We can now see that the problem lies in the fact that Ticket Channel is on the same axis as Ticked created - Day of Week. If we put Ticket Channel into columns, rather than rows, we get the following:

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That looks much more like a regular table we’re used to interpreting! Having used the table trick to make sure our data is structured properly, we can now switch the chart back to a bar chart:

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Just like that, our chart is easily interpretable!

My final tip on chart types: personally, I avoid pie charts unless the data has very few categories. Bar charts and tables often do a better job of conveying clear insights. When in doubt, ask yourself: Does this chart type make the data easier to understand?

Save and Share

Once you’ve built your custom report, save it for future use and consider adding it to a dashboard. This way, your team can access it easily without starting from scratch each time. And don’t forget—you can schedule these reports just like the pre-built dashboards. Scheduling ensures stakeholders see fresh data regularly, without needing to log into Zendesk.

Tips and Tricks

• Test Your Data: Before presenting a custom report or dashboard, double-check that the numbers align with what you expect from other sources. Anyone who’s been here before will know that even a small error can undermine confidence in your report and have stakeholders questioning the validity of the entire display.
• Limit Data Overload: More isn’t always better. Focus on a few key metrics and visualizations for clarity.
• Iterate Based on Feedback: Share your reports with a small group of stakeholders first and ask for their thoughts before sharing more widely

In conclusion

With these tips, tricks and ideas under your belt, Explore really can pivot your Zendesk instance from a black hole of data into an incredibly powerful tool for company-wide insights. Start slowly, see how the pre-existing reports are built, then slowly modify, one element at a time, and you’ll have the perfect Explore reports that will have your team and colleagues mightily impressed!