Entrinsik Informer is a web-based reporting and business intelligence application popular in the higher education vertical market. It helps organizations transform real-time data into actionable information by delivering ad-hoc reporting, data analysis, and interactive dashboards.
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Zendesk Explore
Score 7.8 out of 10
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Zendesk offers Explore, a business intelligence and customer analytics tool which integrates with the Zendesk suite featuring ticket analytics, custom fields, dashboards, and other features. Zendesk is migrating customers of the BIME analytics product, which is approaching end of support, to Zendesk Explore in 2019.
It makes creating queries very easy for end users so not only research or technicians can do it. The availability for creating Live reports that are accessible via Excel on the network has given many of our users the ability to get the information they need in a format they can use without needing someone to translate the raw data
Compared to other analytics functions of other Ticket Management System, Zendesk Explore is the easiest to learn. Moreover, the learning curve is high. Once you pick up the fundamentals, you will be able to create all types of analytic reports. In addition, if you know basic coding or SQL, you can create your own metrics and attributes to capture extremely specific elements such as the tickets that contain a certain word or etc.
Simple user-interface: Informer is relatively easy to learn and end users can begin running reports and creating new reports quickly.
Email "burst" functionality: This feature allows emails to be sent out based on data in the report. So for example, a report could be scheduled that would email all student employment managers listing out the specific employees that report to them that haven't submitted their time sheets. Each manager would only see the rows that correspond to their email address.
Analytics and grouping: Users can quickly drag columns to group and sub-total, and can use the analytics tab to get deeper insights into the data.
As with most "suite" products, if you already use other Zendesk features (Chat, Talk, etc), then Zendesk Explore adds an extra facet to the customer experience. The more we know about our clientele, the better we can understand/anticipate their needs.
I like that we can get as in-depth as we feel is necessary. For example, is just one customer having an issue? Or are many experiencing a similar problem? We can better rack this type of trend using Explore.
Our team can dive deep into the data based on exactly what we're looking for. If the marketing team wants a certain kind of segment, we can give them that info. If we want to sort by date or another set of parameters, we can do that as well.
There are a lot of reports that we have in Informer that say they have never been run, even though I know they have been run. So that makes it really difficult to determine which reports can be deleted to keep a tidy report list.
The only other complaint I have about Informer is that there doesn't seem to be a properly detailed error code/message when the student information system can't be accessed. For example, I am currently trying to move Informer to its own standalone server and I get an error message saying that our license isn't valid. Informer Support sent a new license, which prompted the same message, and the only explanation they have given me is that Informer can't reach the student information system. I would think that if that were the case, the error message would say that instead of an invalid license.
Flexibility: the platform is somewhat limited for the creation of "non-standard" metrics
It is complicated to create dashboards with no previous Zendesk Explore knowledge
The reliability of Zendesk Explore has not been great: we had at least 5 situations when the dashboard was not showing data and had to approach Customer service for support
Informer has been handily meeting most of our reporting needs, and we've created a library of hundreds of reports that are used every day. They have a terrific support service to help when you have questions, and I've found them to be great at listening to what customers would like and adding new features. They are a small company that really listens and really cares, and I've been very pleased over the past few years getting to know them.
From the perspective of the new user and a seasoned user I would say eight would represent both parties. It presents a 'familiar' interface and easy to navigate display. Tagging is quite nice and allows for organization of reports based on those tags. These have to be monitored like anything else to keep them consistent but provides a better than average means of organizing reports.
As previously mentioned, Zendesk Explore is easy to use. There are lots of materials in Zendesk Community. In addition, the live support will also help a lot in learning Zendesk Explore, especially for beginners. Zendesk Explore might be difficult at first to learn, but anyone could learn it in just 7 days. Once the fundamentals are locked in, moving from that place to becoming an amateur at Zendesk Explore is extremely easy. Lastly, if you know basic coding and SQL, you can be a pro at it already.
I would have given 10 but no one and no system is perfect. The only issue with support is not the staff nor the response but the support Wiki and support pages in general run very slow at times. I believe this has been addressed by the company but the technical speed of the pages have been an issue.
Support for all of Zendesk has exceeding my expectations. This company will always get a 10 out of 10 in my book. Any question you have they make sure you have the answer plus a step-by-step guide on how to do each step so you are set up for success!
We bought the product on a Thursday morning, and we were writing reports on Friday afternoon. We did take about a month to manage the Mapping, Linking and Security to allow us to open it up across campus. We are now mapping from as many third-party vendors as we can to enable the creation of more ad-hoc reporting.
I have experience with Advizor AnalystX, and it was just awful. It is advertised as an interactive reporting tool, in which you can use your mouse to select and segment constituents by where they live (by clicking on a map), how much they've given to your institution, when they last gave, etc. In practice, their map feature was unusable; it's a static map image (imagine a paper map hung on your wall), rather than draggable and zoomable Google Maps, and it required hours of work to configure one map region. As far as computing constituents' giving statistics, it required way too much back-end work to build simple giving totals.
Zendesk Explore is more user friendly and the software plus maintenance cost is less. The report section is more detailed and no lag while creating report for a large data source. The report segments and formats are editable which make it more convenient to make a report according to a requirement for an individual.
We have definitely improved customer service due to better reporting using Informer. All departments are better empowered to help our students in a more timely and accurate manner.
Using Informer has given us the ability to eliminate functionality within our ERP system and offload reporting to a data store instead of the transactional system. This has resulted in successfully upgrading our core systems and improved response times.
