Compare Zendesk Explore with Other Tools for Creating Zendesk Reports

Regardless of how big or small your business is, you still rely on data. In fact, making big moves and enjoying rapid growth requires keeping track of various details. The customer tickets have tons of valuable details about your product, business, and customers. All those cumulative data can reveal valuable insights and assist you in making data-driven decisions.

Collecting, learning from, and acting on your business data is the key to improving the way your company interacts with customers and building the right customer experience through data.

As a customer service and cloud ticketing tool, Zendesk can generate tons of data which, in turn, can help optimize your customer experience by analyzing your customers' requests. The best way to make use of the data and help your team perform better is to analyze it via built-in Zendesk reports or other analytical tools. You need the right tools and approaches to generate insightful reports.

In this article, we will explain some basics about Zendesk analytics and reporting, possible tools to widen reporting features, and their benefits and limitations.

Zendesk is a SaaS customer service solution covering an entire cycle of customer communication. Whether your customer wants to connect via chat, email, social media, or phone, Zendesk brings all the interactions under one roof and makes it easy to track support requests, handle customer issues, and monitor the effectiveness of customer service agents. For more in-depth information about Zendesk's basics, check out What Is Zendesk - Complete Hands-on Guide.

Data comes in a variety of formats - all those numbers, charts, and spreadsheets. Without an insight tool, it is hard to keep up with everything. Along with different data formats, customer support and sales can happen anywhere on chat, email, phone, or social media. Zendesk can help you overcome this challenge and integrate data from multiple sources and provide instant access to customer insights that can make your business better.

The reporting overview gives you visibility into how your team performs on multiple fronts, including Zendesk Support, Zendesk Chat, and Zendesk Sell. These reports include the key performance indicators (KPIs) to better understand the customer and identify areas in the business that require improvement.

With Zendesk Sell reporting, you can track the things like:

• Sales activities like the number of emails sent, calls made, and tasks completed
• Health of your sales processes like the number of won deals, incoming deals, and qualified deals
• Goal progress of your sales reps and team
• Sales forecasting

By carefully analyzing sales KPIs, you can identify if your team is on track for success or if you need to adjust some processes. Regardless of the size of your business, sales reporting is an important part of your business.

Zendesk Chat reports help analyze your chat activity and identify:

• How well chat solves your support requests
• The time required to close the ticket
• The level of customer satisfaction

Monitoring chat reports is your first step toward a better product or service. They can point to the problem and help you find the reason. Just building reports isn't enough. How you slice and dice all the numbers even matters more.

Zendesk Support reports allow for monitoring:

• Daily ticket activity
• The performance of your support agents
• Average solution time, etc.

Zendesk features a fully integrated ticketing system to provide a complete picture of each customer. Depending on your Zendesk plan, you have a few options for exporting Zendesk tickets for further analysis.

All Zendesk report types are customizable and can include as many ticket properties as you want to monitor with a report.

Any reporting software is pretty explanatory, it's used to generate reports and provide insights into the state of your business workflows. The key principle behind reporting is to help you understand the current behavior of your customers and identify ways to course-correct it.


The number-one task of reporting tools is to provide your team with simple, readable, and accurate reports on the required KPIs. When it comes to Zendesk, there are a few options and alternatives available:

• Zendesk Explore
• Add-ons for widening Zendesk reports
• External BI tools like Power BI or Tableau

These are three completely different options for making Zendesk reports, and in the following parts, we'll look closer at each option by analyzing all its pros and cons.

Zendesk Explore is a native tool designed to help you analyze, understand, and share your valuable business KPIs. With Explore reports, you can view and analyze key metrics that help you spot your strengths and weaknesses. Along with built-in reports, Zendesk Explore allows for generating custom reports.

Zendesk Explore facilitates collaboration and helps to share reports with others. You can customize the sharing options and even share the reports with individuals who aren't a part of your Support team. Zendesk Explore's functionality depends on the version. It has three versions:

• Explore Lite. It has a range of built-in dashboards for analyzing and understanding Zendesk products. It doesn't include Zendesk custom reports.
• Explore Professionals. It includes all the features of Explore Lite plus tools that allow for report customization like Zendesk custom fields.
• Explore Enterprise. It widens the possibilities of Explore Professional with live dashboards and advanced sharing capabilities.

In some cases, built-in reporting isn't enough for data-driven business decisions. There are dozens of analytics and reporting apps available on Zendesk Marketplace. By stitching together built-in reports and third-party analytics tools, you can fill in the reporting bugs and increase the efficiency of your reports. With additional apps, you can slice and dice the data the way you want. Among the highest rated are Tymeshift Workforce Management, MaestroQA, Realtime Dashboard by BCR and others.

Business intelligence or BI tools provide quick, easy-to-digest access to business insights based on collected data. However, BI tools can't make any forecasts, they offer a way to examine, understand the trend and proceed with insights by streamlining the effort needed to collect, merge, and query the required data.

BI tools can significantly power up Zendesk reports and ensure paramount accuracy and insight into even quickly-changing dynamics. There is a variety of tools and platforms in the BI space, and choosing the right tool can get overwhelming. Some of the major BI players include:

• Tableau
• Power BI
• Google BigQuery
• SAP Analytics Cloud

Power BI Connector for Zendesk allows you to integrate your Zendesk account with a Power BI. The app helps to export Zendesk data to Power BI and provides a no-code integration solution with an intuitive interface, so you don't require additional training to use it. Here's everything you need to know about Power BI Zendesk integration.

Tableau BI Connector for Zendesk is here to power up your Zendesk reporting with Tableau and generate insightful reports. Moreover, Zendesk Tableau Connector provides advanced filtering options to manage data selection and to export only the relevant information. For more information on Tableau and Zendesk Integration, check out our blog.

It takes less than 10 minutes to install apps and create your first data export. All you have to do is install them inside your Zendesk instance and let them do the work.

Choosing the right tools for reporting and analytics is already half the battle. You need to assemble a tech stack that connects all relevant data sources and keeps track of important KPIs.
Speaking of Zendesk, some teams don't need more analytics tools than Zendesk Explore, while others may lack the advanced reporting features or metrics. Here's a framework that can help you evaluate tools for Zendesk reporting and ease your choice:

• Do you need to obtain data from external sources?
• Do you need to share reports with non-Zendesk users?
• How often should you create reports?
• Do you need custom reporting features like filters, custom fields or datasets?
• Do you work with large volumes of data?
• What is your budget for setting up and supporting?

Once you've ticked off all of the points mentioned above, you are in a good position to choose a tool for Zendesk reporting. Do all the checks to be confident in your decision.

Analytical and reporting tools are essential for any business, and Zendesk provides an in-built platform for this. However, there are some limitations to the reporting features of Zendesk that you can overcome with the wide range of tools available to help you widen your reporting capabilities. Ultimately, it is up to you to decide which tool is best for your business needs. We hope this article has helped you learn more about Zendesk analytics and reporting so you can make an informed decision about choosing the right tool for your business.