Evaluating reporting and analytics in your Zendesk Suite trial


This part of theZendesk Suite trial evaluation guidehelps you evaluate reporting and analytics features in the Zendesk Suite to see how they'll work for you. Your trial is on the Suite Professional plan and includes Explore Professional features.


What's my plan?







All Suites

Team, Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus










Support with

Explore Light, Professional, or Enterprise









This part of the Zendesk Suite trial evaluation guide helps you
evaluate reporting and analytics features in the Zendesk Suite to see how they'll work
for you. Your trial is on the Suite Professional plan and includes Explore Professional
features.
Explore for reporting and analytics gives you the tools you need to analyze, understand,
and share your business information. Information for most Zendesk features can be
reported in easy to read prebuilt reports that you can filter to your own needs. When
you want to dig deeper, you can use Explore's powerful reporting tools to build your own
reports.
Follow the steps in this guide to try out reporting and analytics. Each task typically
takes less than 10 minutes to complete (though activating Explore in step 1 can take a
bit longer).
This article contains the following sections:

Step 1: Activate Explore
Step 2: Take a look at the prebuilt dashboards
Step 3: Create a simple custom report (Professional and Enterprise)
Step 4: Create a dashboard (Professional and Enterprise)
Step 5: Share your dashboard
What's next?



Step 1: Activate Explore

Before you can start digging into your data, you'll need to activate Explore. This is
a necessary step as you might have already created tickets in Support, articles in
Guide, or tested other support processes. Explore needs to examine the products you
have installed and read in the necessary data you'll need to view and create
reports. This is a once only operation for you to perform and might take up to two
hours. Don't worry, your agents won't have to perform this step.


Try it out

In this section, you'll open and activate Explore for the first time. If another
admin has already done this, you can skip activation, but you'll need to make
sure that an admin has given you access to complete the rest of this
evaluation.
To open and activate Explore

Click the Zendesk products menu in the top bar, then select
Analytics.

Explore opens on the activation page. Click Activate to start setting
things up. This might take up to two hours, but if you are testing a new
account, it will usually take less time.

Once Explore notifies you that it's finished setting up, you're ready to go.
If you want any other agents to help evaluate Explore, you'll need to give
them access. Read Giving agents access to Explore if
you want to do this.





Step 2: Take a look at the prebuilt dashboards

Now that you've set up Explore, you can start looking at some of the best practices
dashboards that Zendesk created for you. A dashboard is a collection of reports
collected on one or more pages. The available dashboards change regularly, but you
can read all about them in Understanding dashboards or, as you'll learn shortly,
you can just browse the list yourself.


Try it out

In this example, you'll take a look at the prebuilt Zendesk Support dashboard to
discover the average number of tickets created in your Zendesk instance each day
of the week.
To see the report

Click the Zendesk products menu in the top bar, then select
Analytics.
Click the Dashboards icon ( ) in the left sidebar.
From the list of dashboards, choose the Zendesk Support
dashboard.
In the Zendesk Support dashboard, scroll down until you see the Average
tickets created by day of week report.




Tip: If you're wondering how often these reports update with new information, it depends
on which plan you're using. Explore Lite reports update every day, Explore
Professional and Enterprise reports update once an hour (though Explore
Enterprise also features some reports that update in near-real-time). For
detailed information, see Data refresh intervals for Explore
plans.

If you're using Explore Lite, you can skip to the What's next? section, but if you're interested in the more advanced
reports you can create and share with Explore Professional and Enterprise, feel
free to read on.




Step 3: Create a simple custom report (Professional and Enterprise)

Sometimes, the prebuilt dashboards don't contain exactly the report that you need. In
many cases however, you can create your own. Explore Professional and Enterprise
include many hundreds of metrics and attributes you can use to mix-and-match your
own reports. In this section, you'll learn a basic example of creating a custom
report and learn how to find many more examples.


Try it out

In this custom report, you'll create a simple report that shows one-touch
tickets. These are tickets that were solved with only one agent reply. This
report is a great way to gain context into your support efforts. Feel free to
experiment with the various settings to get different results.
To create the report

In Explore, click the reports ( ) icon.
In the Reports library, click New report.
On the Select a dataset page, click Support >
Support - Tickets and then click Start report. The report
builder opens.
Next, add your metric, the thing you want to measure. In this
case, you'll add the number of one-touch tickets. In the Metrics
panel, click Add.
From the list of metrics, choose Agent replies distribution
> One-touch tickets, then click Apply.
Explore displays the total number of
one-touch tickets in your account.

Explore reports can return a lot of data. Using filters is a great
way to restrict the results you return. In the Filters panel, click
Add.
From the list of attributes, choose Time - Ticket solved >
Ticket solved - Date, then click Apply.
In the Filters panel, click the Ticket solved - Date
filter you just added.
On the filter page, click Edit date ranges.
On the Advanced tab of the Date range page, choose
an appropriate range to view, such as 30 days in the past, then click
Apply.

In the Columns panel, click Add.
From the list of attributes, choose Time - Ticket solved >
Ticket solved - Date, then click Apply.

From the visualization type menu ( ), choose a Line
chart.

Click the title at the top of the report (by default, "New report") and
enter a new name for it like One-touch tickets by date.
When you're finished, click Save.

For a more detailed introduction, see Creating reports. This custom report
was taken from our extensive collection of sample Explore reports known as
recipes. See them all at Explore recipes reference.




Step 4: Create a dashboard (Professional and Enterprise)

Reports are great, but you'll usually want to collect bunch of reports together to
send them to others in your organization. Explore dashboards are used to
accomplish this. There are two ways you can do this:

Create a copy of an existing dashboard or one of the prebuilt dashboards and
edit it.
Create a brand new dashboard.



Try it out

In this example, you'll create a new dashboard and add the report you created in
Step 3.
To find all you need to know to create your own dashboards, see Creating dashboards.
To create the dashboard

In Explore, click the Dashboards library icon ( ) on the left side bar.
Click New dashboard.
A new blank dashboard opens.

In your new dashboard, click Add > Add report.
On the Add report page, choose the One-touch tickets by date
report you created in Step
3, then click Add reports.

Your report is added to the dashboard. You'll notice it probably looks too
small or is in the wrong place. You can drag it around and resize it just
like you'd resize a window on your computer.
Once you've got the report positioned just how you want it, click the title
at the top of the dashboard (by default Untitled) and give the
dashboard a name like One-touch tickets dashboard.
The dashboard is saved
automatically. Keep it open and move onto Step 5.


To find all you need to know to create your own dashboards, see Creating dashboards.




Step 5: Share your dashboard

You can share dashboards with agents in your Zendesk account, groups of agents, and
with some Explore plans, people who don't have an account in your Zendesk instance.


Try it out

In this example, you'll share your dashboard with a single person.
To share your dashboard

In your dashboard, click Share.
On the Share dashboard page, find and select the people or groups you
want to share the dashboard with (this example uses "Rob Stack"). You can
type a partial name into the filter box to filter how many names and groups
are shown in the list.

When you are finished, click Invite.

The people you invite will receive an email. The email contains a link they can
click to access the dashboard. If you later make updates to the dashboard, the
people you invited will not see the updates unless you publish the
dashboard first (from the same menu you found the Share command).
To learn all you need to know about sharing dashboards, see Sharing dashboards.




What's next?

If you're ready to start digging further into Explore, start with out getting started guide. To see all of the Explore
documentation and information about free training, see Zendesk Explore resources for reporting and
analytics.


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