Getting started with Zendesk Explore for reporting and analytics

Zendesk Explore for reporting and analysis is designed to help you analyze, understand and share business information. Explore provides comprehensive, built-in reports that help you visualize and analyze important information about your customers and support resources. Explore has custom reporting tools that meet your needs.

When the report is ready, Explore helps you share and collaborate with others. Reports can be shared all at once or periodically to anyone in your organization and, on some plans, to those who were not part of your support team.

In this series of introductory articles, you'll learn the basics to quickly get started with Explore. If you're new to Explore, start with these articles. For more resources, see Next Steps at the end of this article. If you have questions about a term used in this article, check the Zendesk Explore Glossary for its meaning.

Tip: If you're an Insights user upgrading to Explore, you'll find great reference sources at Switching from Insights to Explore.

This article contains the following topics:

Understanding versions of Explore
Explore on-demand training
Explore Activation
Understanding Explore features
next steps
Understanding versions of Explore

Explore comes in three versions:

Explore Lite: provides a selection of pre-built dashboards that you can use to analyze and understand Zendesk products.
Explore Professional: includes pre-built dashboards and tools to help you develop, customize, and share your own reports.
Explore Enterprise: builds on the capabilities of Explore Professional with enterprise-grade features including real-time dashboards and advanced dashboard sharing capabilities.

For a complete list of features, visit Comparison between versions of Explore.

Explore on-demand training

Did you know that all on-demand training courses for Zendesk products are now free?

The following Explore courses are currently available:

Zendesk overview: Explore
On demand: Zendesk Explore, I
On Demand: Zendesk Explore, II
On demand: predefined dashboards
On-demand: Zendesk Chat dashboard
On demand: Zendesk Talk dataset

For a list of training for all Zendesk products, see the Zendesk training page.

Explore Activation

Before you can use Explore, you need to activate it.

To activate Explore, you must subscribe to the Zendesk Support Professional or Enterprise plan, have administrator rights to your Support instance, and use a supported web browser.

When you start using Explore, it prepares your Zendesk data for reporting. Depending on the amount of information and tickets in your account, this process may take a few minutes or a few hours. Select the option to have you notified when Explore is ready to use. For more information, see Activate Explore.

Understanding Explore features

This section introduces some of the key concepts for you to learn about and get the most out of Explore. To use most of the features in this section, you will need Explore Professional or Enterprise.

This section contains the following topics:

Granting Access to Explore
control panels
data sets
queries
sharing and publishing
Granting Access to Explore

To help ensure the security of business information, Explore provides different user roles and permissions, which in turn provide different levels of access to Explore features. In order for your agents to be able to access Explore, you need to configure their roles and permissions.

The following functions can be configured:

Editors can create custom dashboards and reports.
Administrators have the same capabilities as editors, but they can also manage viewers and permissions.
Viewers can view and interact with predefined and shared dashboards.
Users Without access cannot see or access Explore. This is the default role assigned to new users.

If using Support Professional, Explore permissions are configured by an administrator in the Zendesk Admin Center. With Support Enterprise, you configure permissions with custom roles.

For more information, see Granting Agents Access to Explore.

control panels

The dashboard is the framework for your business information.

Zendesk provides pre-built dashboards with information on support metrics, agent activity, and more. You can use the recommended predefined panels, duplicate them to create editable copies or create completely new panels.

A panel is formed by components called widgets that contain several items such as queries, images, text, among others. You can add as many widgets as you like to the dashboard and still arrange them in the format that best suits your needs. Finally, you can share the dashboards with others in your organization.

For more information, see:

Introduction to predefined dashboards
Introduction to creating dashboards
Adding and Arranging Dashboard Widgets
data sets

 Datasets grant you access to Zendesk data. Each dataset contains metrics and attributes that query your Zendesk information.
Metrics are quantitative data, such as the number of tickets or phone calls.
Attributes are qualitative data such as agent names and ticket channels. When you add an attribute to a query, it splits your results to make them more useful.

Before you start creating a query, you need to choose the dataset that gives you access to the information you want. Explore has several datasets that allow you to query your support tickets, Talk calls, etc. Typically, you would choose predefined datasets. However, you can also create copies of these datasets for testing purposes (for example, if you want to create custom metrics).

For information, see Working with Datasets.

queries

An inquiry is a question you ask about your business information. You can ask simple questions like “How many tickets do I have in Open status?” or complex questions like “Between March and December, which agents closed the most tickets?”

Query results are typically displayed in the form of graphs or tables. Explore chooses the most suitable chart format, but you can change it if you want. Once the query is created, you can perform many operations on it, such as changing units, format, presentation, or adding complex calculations that manipulate the query results.

For more information, see:

Introduction to creating queries
Introduction to query modification
sharing and publishing

Once the dashboard is created, you will likely want to share it with others in your organization. Sharing a dashboard sends an invitation email for people to view it. It is also possible to configure panels to be sent by e-mail with certain periodicity.

You can make changes to the dashboard after sharing it. After you finish making the desired changes, republish the dashboard.

For more information, see:

Introduction to sharing dashboards
next steps

getting started guides

This article provided an overview of the basic features of Zendesk Explore. However, Explore has a lot more to offer. For information on getting started with other parts of Explore, see the following articles:

Introduction to predefined dashboards
Introduction to the Explore interface
Introduction to creating queries
Introduction to creating dashboards
Introduction to query modification
Introduction to sharing dashboards
Getting started with Explore: step by step
Introduction to custom metrics and attributes
more resources

Here are some great resources for getting to know Explore and the documentation:

Zendesk Explore Resources: A handy map of all Explore documentation.
Zendesk Explore Q&A: Answers to frequently asked questions about Explore.
If you're an Insights user, our Upgrading Insights to Explore guide will help you migrate to Explore.
Our recipes will help you with reporting common business scenarios with Explore. For details, see the Zendesk Explore recipe reference.