Great product if you have the time to invest upfront!
September 20, 2019

Great product if you have the time to invest upfront!

Julie Pinto | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Zendesk Explore

We use ZenDesk Explore within the support organization. We have set it up to answer such questions as:
  • How many support tickets/month are we getting year over year?
  • What organizations are support tickets coming from?
  • What are the most common types of support tickets - questions? Bugs?
  • How often is our support org escalating to development?
  • Which Knowledge Base articles are accessed frequently and do they help deflect tickets?
  • Which features generate the most support tickets?
We have used this information to provide supporting data to our dev team when prioritizing customer-driven product improvements and fixes. We have also compared this data with overall product usage data (different data source) to determine the relative percentage of support cases compared to overall usage. Otherwise, we may see increasing tickets as a bad thing when really, it's proportional to our increasing product usage. Having ZD Explore helps put support data in context over time.
  • Custom Reports - You can really tailor each query and dashboard with many custom aspects. As soon as you answer one question, you usually have another one! Explore gives the flexibility to refine and tailor your data.
  • Drilling Down - Once you create the big picture dashboards and reports, it's relatively easy to drill down and get the actual list of associated support cases. This is a good validity check to make sure our approach is working.
  • Pre-built dashboards - It helps to get started with what explore has already pulled for you. That way, you have a good baseline from which you can further customize.
  • Query builder - Very hard to use if you don't know your way around data tools. For an org like ours, we don't have a specialized data analyst. It would help if Explore could appeal a bit more to novice data analysts by providing more guidance and being more prescriptive while keeping the option for the advanced approaches.
  • Lack of clarity on applied filters - When you build queries, you apply one set of filters. Then when you pull those queries into a dashboard, you can apply another set of filters to the whole dashboard. It's easy to get lost between the two, and you could end up with a misleading dataset if you don't keep close track of both. It would help if Explore gave better indications of the applied filters on each query when they are pulled into the dashboard.
  • Report builder - When I do share the data from these reports, I typically export each report, then write up an explanation and analysis of what the reading is seeing. It would be amazing if Explore would build out a dynamic report builder for users outside of ZenDesk. I want to share this data in context with our leadership.
For support data, we have only used Explore because it came with our ZenDesk membership. So I can't speak to other solutions! That said, it's awesome to have Knowledge Base and support data in one place.
Explore is well suited for:
  • Organizations who have the people/time to dedicate to data analysis - it's valuable, but it is time consuming at first!
Explore is less well suited for:
  • Organizations where they do not have someone with the appropriate skills to build out the reports that will be valuable. It takes time to understand what questions you are actually trying to answer. From there, you need to understand how to generate the data such that you can then create the reports to answer the questions you want to answer. So that said, it's quite a process.

Zendesk Explore Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
Not Rated
Customizable dashboards
8
Report Formatting Templates
Not Rated
Drill-down analysis
8
Formatting capabilities
8
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
5
Publish to Web
Not Rated
Publish to PDF
Not Rated
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
4
Delivery to Remote Servers
Not Rated
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
Not Rated
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
Not Rated
Predictive Analytics
Not Rated
Multi-User Support (named login)
Not Rated
Role-Based Security Model
8
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
8
Single Sign-On (SSO)
8
Responsive Design for Web Access
Not Rated
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Not Rated
REST API
Not Rated
Javascript API
Not Rated
iFrames
Not Rated
Java API
Not Rated