Explore recipe: Calculating estimated cost of service



What's my plan?





All Suites

Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus









Support with

Explore Professional or Enterprise





How much does it cost your support team to tackle questions about various issue types or how much time do you spend on various customers?
In this report, you'll use data collected by the Zendesk Time Tracking app to create a cost of service metric you can use in your reports.


Important: Values produced by this calculation are estimated and are intended only to give you an indication of support charges. This article is provided for instructional purposes only. Please post any issues you have in the comments section below.

This article contains the following topics:

What you'll need
Creating the cost of service metric
Using the cost of service metric
Next steps



What you'll need

Skill level: Medium
Time required: 20 minutes

Zendesk Explore Professional or Enterprise
Editor or Admin permissions (see Giving agents access to Explore)
Ticket data in Zendesk Support
The Zendesk Time Tracking app must be installed, and must have collected data


Note: The time tracking app stores data in custom numeric fields that are synchronized with Explore. If you have installed the Time Tracking app recently, the data required to build necessary calculated metrics might not yet be synced with Explore. This sync occurs once an hour.






Creating the cost of service metric

The time tracking app tracks how long agents spend working on various tickets. The app reports this in seconds, but for this recipe, you’ll convert the value into hours by creating a new calculated metric.

In Explore, click the reports ( ) icon.
In the Reports library, click New report.
On the Select a dataset page, click Support > Support - Tickets dataset. This dataset is where the historic custom field data from the Time Tracking app is stored.
In the report builder, open the calculations menu ( ), then click Standard calculated metric.
Name the new metric Cost of service metric.
In the formula window, enter the following formula:
VALUE(Total time spent (sec))/3600*(your hourly rate)

Tip: If you're working in a language other than English, read this article to help you enter Explore formulas in your language.

For example, if your hourly rate is $15.99, enter
VALUE(Total time spent (sec))/3600*15.99

When you are finished, click Save.





Using the cost of service metric

Now you've created the metric, you can use it in any of your reports that use the Support: Tickets dataset.
To use the cost of service metric in a report

In Explore, open a new report using the Support: Tickets dataset.
In the Metrics panel, click Add.
From the list of metrics, choose Calculated metrics > Cost of service metric, then click Apply. Explore displays the total cost of service for all tracked time spent on tickets.

Now, you can add attributes to the Columns or Rows panel to slice this cost data to your needs. For example, add the Ticket ID attribute to see the cost for each ticket, or the Assignee name attribute to see the cost for each assignee.



Next steps

You can change the display format of this metric to dollar amounts from the display format page of the chart configuration menu ( ) . By slicing this metric by various attributes, you can produce detailed cost estimates for different parts of your organization.
For more help, see Creating reports.


{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "TechArticle",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408846694170",
"url": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408846694170-Explore-recipe-Calculating-estimated-cost-of-service",
"headline": "Explore recipe: Calculating estimated cost of service",
"description": "You can calculate an estimated cost of service metric by using time tracking data and a custom formula to convert tracked time into cost based on an hourly rate in your support reports.",
"articleSection": "Ticket reporting recipes",
"datePublished": "2021-10-16T05:34:51+00:00",
"dateModified": "2025-09-06T00:03:43+00:00",
"inLanguage": "en-US",
"mainEntityOfPage": {
"@type": "WebPage",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408846694170"
},
"author": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Zendesk",
"@id": "https://www.zendesk.com"
},
"publisher": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Zendesk",
"@id": "https://www.zendesk.com"
},
"isPartOf": {
"@type": "WebSite",
"name": "Zendesk Help",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/"
},
"about": {
"@type": "SoftwareApplication",
"name": "Zendesk",
"@id": "https://www.zendesk.com",
"softwareAddOn": {
"@type": "SoftwareApplication",
"name": "Explore",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/4405298856346"
}
}
}