IBM Cognos is a full-featured business intelligence suite by IBM, designed for larger deployments. It comprises Query Studio, Reporting Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio, and Cognos Administration along with tools for Microsoft Office integration, full-text search, and dashboards.
$10
per month per user
Zendesk Explore
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
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.
IBM Cognos Analytics has great scheduling capabilities. A single report can be parameterized (e.g., “Store Manager ID”) and burst to thousands of recipients with their slice of data.IBM Cognos Analytics is a good fit for highly complex, multi-level calculations which can be handled by Report Studio. For example Monthly balance sheet that requires multi step calculation
Zendesk Explore is well suited for tracking ticket flow, agent performance, and customer satisfaction providing valuable insights into response and resolution time, workload and support quality. Particularly useful for monitoring ticket handling for different teams. Helps ensure accountability by tracking how long tickets remain assigned before being reassigned to another group. Drill down capability helps identify support bottlenecks. However, it is less appropriate for real time monitoring as it lacks real time data updates making it unsuitable for instant decision making.
IBM Cognos Analytics enables customer data segmentation, which is essential for marketing, improving and streamlining purchasing behavior and preferences. This helps companies create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.
Our clients Through data analysis, we can identify and observe trends in the behavior of other clients, allowing us to anticipate needs and adjust strategies to avoid consequences.
Some aspects of Zendesk, in general, are not super intuitive. The same goes for Zendesk Explore. And, while you can google answers and hope you find something helpful, there isn't a great way to learn to get the full potential out of the product unless you want to pay for someone from your team to take a class (which costs several hundred dollars).
To piggyback off the last point, if you would prefer to get help from a Zendesk expert, you'll find that there is almost no customer support available to you. For a company that aims to help other companies help their customers, this has always struck me as odd. Again, Google is your friend and beyond that, you're mostly out of luck.
For an existing solution, renewing licenses does provide a good return on investment. Additionally, while rolling out scorecards and dashboards with little adhoc capabilities, to end users, cognos is very easily scalable. It also allows to create a solution that has a mix of OLAP and relational data-sources, which is a limitation with other tools. Synchronizing with existing security setup is easy too.
We have a strong user base (3500 users) that are highly utilizing this tool. Basic users are able to consume content within the applied security model. We have a set of advanced users that really push the limits of Cognos with Report and Query Studio. These users have created a lot of personal content and stored it in 'My Reports'. Users enjoy this flexibility.
I rate Zendesk Explore 8 out of 10 for it's overall usability because it offers powerful reporting and analytics with an easy to navigate interface and intuitive dashboards. It helps improve customer satisfaction by providing valuable insights into ticket handling, agent performance and customer satisfaction. Though the complex query builder can be challenging for non technical users.
Reports can typically be viewed through any browser that can access the server, so the availability is ultimately up to what the company utilizing it is comfortable with allowing, though report development tends to be more picky about browsers and settings as mentioned above. It also has an optional iPad app and general mobile browsing support, but dashboards lack the mobile compatibility. What keeps it from getting a higher score is the desktop tools that are vital to the development process. The compatibility with only Windows when the server has a wide range of compatibility can be a real sore point for a company that outfits its employees exclusively with Mac or Linux machines. Of course, if they are planning on outsourcing the development anyways, it's a rather moot point
Overall no major complaints but it doesn't handle DMR (Dimensionally Modeled for Relational) very well. DMR modelling is a capability that IBM Cognos Framework Manager provides allowing you to specify dimensional information for relational metadata and allows for OLAP-style queries. However, the capability is not very efficient and, for example, if I'm using only 2 columns on a 20-column model, the software is not smart enough to exclude 18 columns and the query side gets progressively larger and larger until it's effectively unusable.
Why is their web application not working as fast as you think it should? They never know, and it is always a a bunch of shots in the dark to find out. Trying to download software from them is like trying to find a book at the library before computers were invented.
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!
Onsite training provided by IBM Cognos was effective and as expected. They did not perform training with our data which was a bit difficult for our end-users.
The online courses they offer are thorough and presented in such a way that someone who isn't already familiar with the general design methodologies used in this field will be capable of making a good design. The training environments are provided as a fully self contained virtual machine with everything needed already to create the environments. We've had some persisting issues with the environments becoming unavailable, but support has been responsive when these issues arise and straightening them out for us
Make sure that any custom tables that you have, are built into your metadata packages. You can still access them via SQL queries in Cognos, but it is much easier to have them as a part of the available metadata packages.
My company selected IBM Congos Analytics because of its advanced features and data representation for data analysis. Its row and column features are very effective for creating dashboards and reports to visualize data. It's chart representation and view format are very attractive and useful for representation.
I selected Zendesk Explore only to provide an easy and quick access for my managers and supervisors regading metrics and volume trends. Is not the most flexible nor complete data visualization tool, but works well for day-to-day follow ups. You need to use another tool if you want to see long-term patterns (e.g. month over month volume trends) and you need another platform if you want your interaction metrics to interact with other important factors of the business
The Cognos architecture is well suited for scalability. However, the architecture must be designed with scalability in mind from day one of the implementation. We recently upgraded from 10.1 to 10.2.1 and took the opportunity to revamp our architecture. It is now poised for future growth and scalability.
