Introduction

Zendesk Explore can feel like a treasure chest for customer service teams. With thousands of tickets flooding in daily, each carrying dozens of data points, most admins are sitting on a goldmine of insights. Yet, most admins and CS managers barely scratch the surface, missing out on critical opportunities to improve performance, make data-driven decisions and impress superiors with company insights not available from anywhere else. In this two-part article, I’ll guide you step by step to unlock the power of Zendesk’s existing reporting tools—making data less overwhelming and more actionable.

Understanding Explore’s Built-In Reporting

The good news is that Zendesk Explore comes with a robust set of pre-built dashboards that give you a head start on analyzing your customer service operations. These dashboards cover metrics like ticket volume, agent performance, and customer satisfaction. While they’re designed to provide immediate value, you’ll get the most out of them with a little tweaking and some regular usage.

Start With the Right Dashboard

Explore’s default dashboards are your best friend when starting out. For example:

• Support Dashboard: Offers an overview of your ticket management metrics, such as average resolution time and first reply time. For many CS managers, seeing this dashboard for the first time can be either positively mind-blowing, or a little overwhelming!
• Satisfaction Dashboard: Focuses on customer feedback, breaking down satisfaction ratings to uncover trends.

Make Dashboards Your Own (But Not Too Much)

Even the best default dashboard isn’t perfect for every business. I’ve found that small customizations can go a long way in making the data more relevant to your team. For instance:

• Filter by Team or Agent: Use filters to zero in on specific groups or individuals to see how they’re performing.
• Adjust Timeframes: Depending on your reporting cadence, you might want to switch the default view from weekly to monthly data.

It’s worth noting that whilst you can play around with the filters on Explore’s default dashboards, you can’t make any permanent edits. To do this, you’ll need to clone the dashboard and give it a new name.

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Be careful here: Over-customizing can make the dashboard unwieldy. Stick to changes that genuinely add value and check out best practices in Part 2 before making any big edits!

Schedule Dashboards for Stakeholders

One of Explore’s most underrated features is the ability to schedule dashboards to be sent directly to stakeholders. This saves your team from constantly logging into Zendesk to fetch data (and some stakeholders may not even be on Zendesk, nor want to learn). You can set these dashboards to be emailed daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on the recipient’s needs.

Here’s why this is brilliant:

1. Regular Insights: Teams stay up-to-date without needing to ask for reports.
2. Flexibility: Dashboards can be sent as visually sleek images or CSV files, making it easy for stakeholders to plug data straight into their own reporting on Sheets or Excel

For example, I normally suggest scheduling a weekly performance dashboard for my clients’ team leads. They receive a clean visual summary on Monday mornings, ensuring they’re prepared for team meetings without any extra work on my part or the CS manager’s part.

Highlight Key Metrics

Focus your attention on metrics that matter most to your organisation’s goals. These might include:

• First Response Time: A key indicator of customer satisfaction.
• Ticket Backlog: Tracks the efficiency of your team.
• CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) Score: A direct reflection of customer happiness.

The trick here is not to overwhelm stakeholders with too many metrics at once. Highlight the top three to five KPIs and ensure they’re front and centre on your dashboards.

This is a good use case for creating your own dashboard. In fact, it’s a perfect first dashboard to make as you can duplicate the default dashboards and, rather than trying to add your own custom reporting (which is very do-able but requires some learning), you simply have to delete the less-relevant reports, which is marvellously easy to do! Once done, you’ll have a very concise and extremely insightful high-level  dashboard ready to send out to your stakeholders.

Troubleshooting and Fine-Tuning

Even with the pre-built reports, you might encounter some hurdles. Perhaps a metric isn’t displaying as expected, or the data looks off. My advice? Double-check your filters and data sources. Sometimes, the issue is as simple as a filter being set to the wrong date range, or having two conflicting filters set at once. If in doubt, reset all filters and check the data, then add one new filter at a time, looking to see how that filter affects the data each time. Just like tasting a dish after adding each ingredient, this will help you understand what each filter is really doing to your reports.

If  you’re confident in your data but the visualisations aren’t clicking (tables can contain a lot of data but are also an eyesore), consider swapping to a different chart type. For example, I like to use bar charts for comparing agent performance, as they make variations more immediately obvious than tables or line graphs.

Wrapping Up Part 1

By mastering Zendesk Explore’s built-in dashboards, you’re already leagues ahead of most admins who let this powerful tool gather dust. From customizing default dashboards to scheduling them for key stakeholders, these practices ensure you’re delivering value without overcomplicating your process.

But built-in tools can only take you so far. In Part 2, we’ll explore creating custom reports from scratch—a game-changer for truly understanding and optimizing your customer service performance. Let’s dive in!