Making Sense of Zendesk Reporting (Without Losing Your Mind)

If you’re a new customer of Zendesk, someone looking to up their game or even if you’re just shopping for the right customer support tool for your organization this article is designed to help you understand one of the key features of Zendesk: it’s reporting!

What Is Zendesk Reporting?

Zendesk is a powerful and popular customer service ticketing platform.

The Zendesk platform is made up of a number of modules that you can pick and choose to configure the service you need including Zendesk Support, Zendesk AI Agents, and more.

They are a longstanding player in the space with a mature and expansive feature offering popular with companies of all sizes and types.

Zendesk Explore is Zendesk’s reporting and analytics platform, and it’s your viewport into your customer experience—from the performance of your team to the happiness of your customers.

You’ll use it to measure the stuff that matters most to you: ticket volume, resolution times, individual agent performance, and CSAT. 

Before you start running reports and building dashboards it helps to understand the foundations of how Zendesk reporting and analytics are built. There are two key pieces that make up Zendesk reporting experience:

Default Reporting Dashboards within Zendesk

Zendesk comes preconfigured with a number of dashboards built for support professionals out of the box with no configuration required.

These are a great place to start to both understand your organization and what is possible with Zendesk Reporting.

• Zendesk Support – Tracks ticket metrics, agent activity, SLAs, satisfaction, and efficiency.
• Zendesk Talk – Monitors call volume, wait times, agent availability, and call outcomes.
• Zendesk Chat – Reports on chat volume, agent performance, and visitor engagement.
• Zendesk Messaging – Similar to Chat, focused on async conversations across channels.
• Zendesk Guide – Measures Help Center performance like article views, searches, and deflection.
• Zendesk Answer Bot – Tracks bot resolutions, deflection rate, and fallback escalations.
• Zendesk Omnichannel – Provides unified insights across all support channels.
• Zendesk AI – Offers visibility into AI features like triage, automation, and intent detection.
• Intelligent Triage (add-on) – Advanced analysis of ticket categorization and routing.
• Live Dashboard (Professional and Enterprise only) – Real-time views of support metrics.

While these Zendesk reporting dashboards are helpful for learning, they are by default read-only. Plans that include Explore Professional and Enterprise can make copies of these default dashboards that can be further customized.

Taking It to the Next Level: How to Run a Custom Report in Zendesk

Zendesk Explore is a fully featured reporting tool but you don’t have to be a data scientist to use it. It’s designed to empower you to actually see what’s going on in your support org.

It turns all your customer interaction data into charts, dashboards, and metrics you can slice up any way you want—by team, channel, tag, or whatever weird filter your VP wants this week.

Explore is an advanced reporting interface. Think of it as your data playground once you outgrow the default reports. It’ll allow you to create dashboards and reports:

• Reports: These are individual data queries. Each report tracks a specific trend or KPI. You build these in the Query Builder and then add them to dashboards. A report helps you answer a question like, “who solved the most tickets last week?”
• Dashboards: Pre-built or custom, dashboards let you organize related reports for a holistic view. Useful for execs, team leads, and individual contributors on your team. A dashboard helps you answer broader questions like, “what was the experience in the queue last week?”

Zendesk Explore Datasets

You’ll need to pick a dataset before building a report. Your dataset determines what kinds of information you’re pulling in and what you can learn.

Here’s a quick overview of the most common and important data sets to help you get started.

Support: Tickets

This is the bread and butter. It’s got all your ticket-level data: status, priority, tags, assignee, requester, channel, etc.

If you’re building dashboards to track ticket volume, SLAs, or backlog—start here.

Support: Users

Details on your customers and agents. Useful for things like tracking requester orgs, roles, language, and how active different users are.

Handy when you’re trying to answer “who’s blowing us up the most?”

Support: Satisfaction

Just the CSAT stuff. You’ll get ratings, comments, time of rating, who submitted it, and so on. This one’s nice for drilling into feedback trends without digging through ticket noise.

Support: SLAs

Only available if you’re using SLA policies. Shows whether tickets hit or missed their SLA targets, with timestamps and breach data.

It’s the one you show leadership when they want to know if the team’s “hitting goals.”

Messaging

If you’re using Zendesk Messaging, this dataset gives you conversation-level detail—messages sent, reply times, resolution outcomes, etc.

Think of it as the chatty cousin to Support: Tickets.

Talk

Voice support data. Call volumes, duration, wait times, IVR paths, wrap-up times, etc. Great for proving why the phone queue needs another human being.

Guide: Knowledge Base

Data on help center articles: views, votes, searches, deflection rates. Useful if you’re trying to figure out which docs are pulling their weight and which need a rewrite.

While Zendesk Explore enables some basic reporting on your knowledge base, it’s limited.

Zendesk apps like Help Center Analytics unlock a fuller, deeper understanding of how your help center is performing.

Sell

This only applies if you’re using Zendesk Sell. Tracks deals, leads, activities, and pipeline stuff. It’s not relevant for most support use cases, unless you’re blending CS + sales metrics.

Customizing Zendesk Reports

Zendesk reports are the building blocks of a dashboard. A report is intended to answer a single question or make sense of a trend. A report itself is made up of two key fundamentals.

Grasping these fundamentals empowers you to create the dashboards of your dreams (or your VP’s dreams, anyway). 

To build great custom Zendesk reports, you need to know the difference between metrics and attributes:

• Metrics: These are the core data points you’re measuring. They’re measurable things like the number of solved tickets, first reply time, or CSAT scores from customers.
• Attributes: These are your filters and groupings. They slice your metric(s) into something more meaningful. Want to look at CSAT by agent or backlog by channel? You’ll do that with attributes.

Is It Possible for Reports to Auto-Populate Data?

Zendesk Explore reports update in near real time. You can schedule them to email out, export them as CSV/XML, or just refresh on the dashboard within Zendesk.

If your stakeholders want a weekly snapshot, just set it and forget it.

For customers who want a truly real time experience, Zendesk does offer a live dashboard for customers on the Professional or Enterprise plans.

The live dashboard is like the air traffic controller, tracking current load and agent availability across Support, Talk, Chat, and Messaging. It is an omni-channel command center, and it’s often a great tool for larger teams with high volumes.

Customers on the Enterprise plan can go a step farther and customize this dashboard, but don’t feel too left out if you’re on the Professional plan, because the default dashboard is fantastic.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Zendesk Reports

Zendesk has one of the most robust reporting platforms in the customer support space. You can track just about anything with it and feel confident you’ve got insight into every corner of your support ecosystem.

For some teams, that might be exactly what they need but for others the trade-offs just aren’t worth it.

Pros

• Fully flexible and incredibly powerful reporting.
• High value pre-built dashboards save time.
• Not walled in—reports can be exported and scheduled.
• Enables tracking by channel, org, tag, and more.

Cons

• UI is clunky and difficult to learn for many users.
• Many advanced features are hidden behind permissions.
• Some features are gated behind higher level plans.
• Insights and Explore don’t fully integrate.

Zendesk Report Use Cases

Zendesk reporting fills all kinds of needs for customer support teams of all sizes, but here are some common use cases that you may want to take advantage of. 

Service Level Agreement (SLA) Adherence

Zendesk offers a critical reporting recipe for understanding your organization’s adherence to SLAs. With it, you can see the distribution of your tickets across their SLA targets.

This gives leaders a striking view of your organization’s ability to deliver on your promises.

Source

If managing SLAs effectively is a challenge, you may need to rethink how you’re setting and managing your Zendesk ticket priorities. 

Workforce Management

If you’re leading a large team, it’s important to have insights into scheduling and staffing easily available at the tip of your fingers. Zendesk offers a robust set of reports that enable you to understand the movements and needs of your staffing quickly.

One powerful reporting recipe is for tracking agent status over time.

Zendesk’s workforce management reports go far beyond that, enabling you to track metrics like:

• Scheduled Time.
• Total Time.
• Attendance duration.
• Occupancy.
• Unpaid General Talk Time.
• Late occurrences.
• Late duration.
• Left Early occurrences.
• Left Early duration.
• Overtime occurrences.
• Overtime duration.

Re-opened Ticket Tracking

If your team is striving for one-touch tickets, which are support interactions resolved by a single reply from your team, you’ll need to track ticket re-openings by your end users.

Trend Spotting

Ticket tags are a powerful way to understand trends in your customer interactions, but only if you have your reporting set up to make that possible. 

This report recipe teaches you how to create “groups” of similar tags that enable you to report on issues at a higher level and help you spot trends even faster. 

For example, you might make groups of tags that reflect a piece of your product (invoices, and payments grouped together as billing) or you might make groups that reflect subjective experiences like customer pain points. 

Ticket Volume Forecasting

Zendesk Explore can even help you understand the future — though it is only basing its predictions on the past!

Still, accurately forecasting Zendesk ticket volume is a critical part of planning your team’s work and growth, and this report recipe helps make that forecasting process significantly easier. 

Source

If your forecast shows a large volume of tickets or if you know your team is going to fall behind, you may need to focus on reducing your ticket backlog. 

Unearthing Customer Sentiment

CSAT is a great opportunity to understand the experience your customers are having, but often folks focus on the number alone.

You can create a report with this Zendesk recipe that surfaces negative CSAT scores that include a comment, allowing you to hone in exactly what wasn’t working for your customers.

Putting It Together to Create Great Zendesk Reporting

You’re now ready to dive into Zendesk and start reporting. Whether you’re happy to work from the default dashboards or you’re itching to crack them open to see how they work, Zendesk reporting has the capacity and flexibility to help you.

Don’t be afraid to click every filter, or adjust your metrics and see what happens. Learning is messy. Adjust, filter and play with reports until you’ve got a dashboard that answers the questions that are important to your support organization.

Enhance your team’s productivity and make their lives easier with Swifteq’s suite of Automation, Help Center and Agent-Assist Zendesk® apps. Start your 14-day free trial today or ask for demo.