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Zendesk Reporting: Explore 4 Options to Build Zendesk Reports

What is zendesk, what is zendesk reporting, zendesk explore, built-in reports in zendesk reporting, zendesk custom reports with bi tools, which zendesk reporting tool to choose, conclusions.

Table of Contents:

It is a table of contents. Click on the needed subheading and switch between parts of the article.

When to Use Zendesk Explore

  • New Tickets : the number of new tickets created during the reporting period.
  • Solved Tickets : the number of tickets solved during the reporting period.
  • Backlog : the total number of unsolved tickets in Zendesk Support at present.
  • Agent Touches : the number of agent updates to tickets during the reporting period.
  • Satisfaction Rating : the average customer satisfaction rating given during the reporting period.
  • First Reply Time : the average amount of time it took an agent to make the first public comment on a ticket, measured in calendar hours.

When to Use Zendesk Custom Reports

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Simplifying Zendesk Reporting: 3 Easy Methods

By: Karan Singh Pokhariya Published: January 27, 2022

While you have got the option of setting up any number of channels to communicate with your customers, the primary medium for any use case or industry is still E-mail. You might have a single E-mail Address that channels all the customer inquiries such as [email protected] or several E-mail Addresses for different requests. Either way, they can all be forwarded right into your account to automatically create tickets for your team to manage. This is where Zendesk and Zendesk Reporting comes into play.

Table of Contents

Zendesk is a Cloud-Based Customer Support software that helps you track and measure your support tickets and ensures that your customers are receiving the highest level of customer service. These tickets are generally the queries or issues raised by your customers. Zendesk Reporting ensures that your customers are being responded to on time effectively and efficiently. It also provides you an overview of your team’s performance and supports Ticket Analysis.

Ticket Analysis is an approach to improve your Customer Support and use the results to improve your business. It helps you keep track of your customer’s queries and issues which eventually improves the relationship with your customers. It also helps you manage your team’s workload and performance.

This article will introduce you to Zendesk Reporting. It also introduces you to 3 different types of Zendesk Reporting methods that you can choose from based on your business requirements. It also provides you with the steps to create Custom Reports, add Metrics, Attributes, and Filters to your reports using Insights in Zendesk Reporting.

Prerequisites

What is zendesk, what is zendesk reporting, method 1: zendesk explore.

  • Steps to Compare Key Tickets Metrics using Built-in Reports in Zendesk Reporting

Steps to Create Custom Reports using Insights in Zendesk Reporting

Steps to add metrics to your report using insights in zendesk reporting, steps to add attributes to your report using insights in zendesk reporting, steps to add filters to your report using insights in zendesk reporting, displaying the number of users in each organization associated with your zendesk account, displaying users associated with your zendesk account, zendesk reports to get you started, exporting reports, editing and cloning reports.

Listed below are the prerequisites for Zendesk Reporting:

  • A Zendesk account.

Zendesk is one of the most popularly used customer-service, available as a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) application. With Zendesk’s all-in-one suite, which contains a Ticketing System,  Analytics and Reporting  modules, a Sales-Based CRM, Call-Center offerings, and a lot more, you can track a customer’s entire journey in absolute depth.

Talking about Zendesk Reporting, it ensures that your customers are being responded to on time effectively and efficiently. But the reporting features of Zendesk typically render a brief overview and random inclusions, and it lacks automatization. But worry no more, we are here to simplify Zendesk Reporting for you, check out our  detailed guide  on Zendesk Reporting.

Zendesk provides robust integration support with a variety of applications such as social media channels, marketing automation software, business intelligence tools, etc. making it the ideal solution to facilitate communication between the customers and the organization.

With a competitive subscription-based pricing model, it allows users to subscribe either to a monthly or an annual plan, scalable as per data needs and team size. It is the go-to solution for startups and large organizations.

For further information on Zendesk, you can check the  official website here.

Zendesk is Cloud-Based Customer Support software that helps you respond to tickets raised by your customers. It allows you to group your team members into groups like Sales, Support, etc. This helps you assign tickets to the right group. In addition, you can also group your customers into organizations that most commonly represent their business model. With Zendesk Reporting, you can easily see all the tickets submitted by any member of an organization right from one profile in your account.

Zendesk Reporting also provides you the option to enable Domain Mapping that automatically places new customers into the right organization based on the domain in their email address. If you already have a long list of customers or companies that you support then you can bulk upload them into your account with a simple CSV file.

Now the question arises: What type of tickets are your customers raising and what information do your team members need to solve those tickets? You can track this information in your Zendesk account. You can create fields for your customers or team members to fill out. These can be set up as Drop-Down Menus, Checkboxes, Data Fields, etc. so that you can categorize your tickets in whatever way it makes the most sense for your business. 

This also turns your tickets into valuable data that you can report upon when analyzing the types of tickets you are getting more often, taking more time to resolve, and leading to happy or unhappy customers.

For more information on Zendesk Reporting, click here .

Simplify Report Analysis using Hevo’s No-code Data Pipeline

Hevo Data , a No-code Data Pipeline helps to Load Data from any data source such as Databases, SaaS applications, Cloud Storage, SDK,s, and Streaming Services and simplifies the ETL process. It supports 100+ data sources (including Zendesk, etc.) and is a 3-step process by just selecting the data source, providing valid credentials, and choosing the destination. Hevo loads the data onto the desired Data Warehouse, enriches the data, and transforms it into an analysis-ready form without writing a single line of code.

Its completely automated pipeline offers data to be delivered in real-time without any loss from source to destination. Its fault-tolerant and scalable architecture ensure that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss and supports different forms of data. The solutions provided are consistent and work with different Business Intelligence (BI) tools as well.

Check out why Hevo is the Best:

  • Secure: Hevo has a fault-tolerant architecture that ensures that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss.
  • Schema Management: Hevo takes away the tedious task of schema management & automatically detects the schema of incoming data and maps it to the destination schema.
  • Minimal Learning: Hevo, with its simple and interactive UI, is extremely simple for new customers to work on and perform operations.
  • Hevo Is Built To Scale: As the number of sources and the volume of your data grows, Hevo scales horizontally, handling millions of records per minute with very little latency.
  • Incremental Data Load: Hevo allows the transfer of data that has been modified in real-time. This ensures efficient utilization of bandwidth on both ends.
  • Live Support: The Hevo team is available round the clock to extend exceptional support to its customers through chat, email, and support calls.
  • Live Monitoring: Hevo allows you to monitor the data flow and check where your data is at a particular point in time.

Methods to Create Reports in Zendesk Reporting

Zendesk Reporting provides you various Reporting Methods. You can go with the method that complements your business model and requirements. Listed below are the Zendesk Reporting methods that you choose from:

Zendesk Reporting helps you manage and analyze every aspect of your customer’s experience and a big part of that is understanding your customer service data. One of the methods to create reports in Zendesk Reporting is Zendesk Explore. It is an Analytical Service by Zendesk that lets you collect, learn, and act on your data. This helps you improve the way your company interacts with your customers.

Zendesk Explore provides a set of Pre-Built Charts and Dashboards that cover all the ways you interact with your customers. These are based on industry-leading standards and help you turn data into insights that you can act on. It is easy to customize Zendesk Explore. It allows you to build your dashboards, Charts, and Metrics, without writing any code. So, you can measure and drill into whatever is important to your business like how many customers raised tickets on your mobile app about a particular service, etc.

With Zendesk Explore, you can easily share your insights so you can generate automatic weekly reports for your team members. You can also identify the topics your customers ask about most that help your Product team to make necessary adjustments.

For more information on Zendesk Reporting: Zendesk Explore, click here .

Method 2: Built-in Reports

With Built-in Reports in Zendesk Reporting, you can compare Key Ticket Metrics. There are various Key Ticket Metrics available in Zendesk Reporting such as:

  • New Tickets: It tells you the number of new tickets created during the Reporting Time/Period.
  • Solved Tickets: It tells you the number of tickets that have been solved during the Reporting Time/Period.
  • Backlog: It tells you the total number of tickets that haven’t been solved yet.
  • Agent Touches: It tells you the number of agents who have updated their tickets during the Reporting Time/Period.
  • Satisfaction Rating: It is the Average Customer Satisfaction rating given during the Reporting Time/Period.
  • First Reply Time: It tells you the average time taken by an agent to make the first public comment for a ticket.

Steps to Compare Key Ticket Metrics using Built-in Reports in Zendesk Reporting

Now you have a basic understanding of Key Ticket Metrics, it is time to compare these Key Ticket Metrics for better analysis. Follow the steps below to compare Key Ticket Metrics using Built-in Reports in Zendesk Reporting:

  • Log in to your Zendesk account.
  • Click on the “Reporting” icon in the Zendesk Support Sidebar.
  • Select the “Reporting Period” at the top as shown in the image below. You can customize your Reporting Period and can set a specific range up to 3 months. If not, then you can choose a Predefined Period.
  • Click one of the Ticket Statis and then click on the second Ticket Stats for comparison.
  • You can also hover your mouse over the graph to see the daily totals.

Method 3: Custom Reports using Insights

Although people have switched to Zendesk Explore because of its easy-to-use feature, Insights is still one of the widely used Customer Reporting methods from Zendesk Reporting. With Insights, you can create your Custom Metrics and Dashboards. After enabling Insights in Zendesk Reporting, you can create your custom report, add your data for analysis, filter your reports, customize your reports and also change the report visibility.

Follow the steps below to create Custom Reports using Insights in Zendesk Reporting:

  • Click on the “Reporting” icon in the sidebar and then go to the “Insights” tab.
  • Click on the “GoodData” in the upper-right corner and there select “Report” in the toolbar.
  • Once done, click on the “Create Report” button as shown in the image below. This will automatically create a report for you and redirect you to the “Report Editor” .
  • The Report Editor contains 3 panels viz. What, How, and Filter. With Report Editor, you can add Metrics, Attributes, and Filters to your report.

Follow the steps below to add Metrics to your report using Insights in Zendesk Reporting:

  • After getting redirected to the Report Editor page, click on the “What” button.
  • In the “View By” drop-down list, select “Folder” or “Tags” to view the Metrics list.
  • Click on the Metrics that you want to keep for your report as shown in the image below. You can also search for a specific Metric using the search bar option.

Follow the steps below to add Attributes to your report using Insights in Zendesk Reporting:

  • On the Report Editor page, click on the “How” button.
  • In the “View By” drop-down list, select “Folder” or “Tags” to view the Attributes list.
  • Click on the Attributes that you want to keep for your report as shown in the image below. You can also search for a specific Attribute using the search bar option.

Follow the steps below to add Filters to your report using Insights in Zendesk Reporting:

  • On the Report Editor page, click on the “Filter” button. It is advised to add Filters to your report once you are done with adding Data, Metrics, Attributes to your report.
  • Here you will see different types of Filters that you can choose from such as Ranking Filter, Numeric Range Filter, Variable Filter, etc. Select the Filters that you want to add to your report as shown in the image below.
  • Once you are done with selecting the required Filters, click on the “Apply” button.

These are the 3 methods in Zendesk Reporting that you can choose from according to your business model and requirements.

A ticket organization is defined as a group you create where users can be placed, for instance, “VIP Customers” or “Beta Testing”. In this instance, you’ll generate a report that depicts all of your organizations and how many users are allocated to each. If you want to depict the organizations associated with your account, follow the steps mentioned below:

  • Step 1 : Scroll to the Explore Section on your Zendesk dashboard, and click on the Query icon. Next, choose New Query from the Queries Library.
  • Step 2 : When you reach the ‘Choose a Dataset’ Page, click Support > Tickets > Support: Tickets, then choose New Query. This opens up the Query Builder.
  • Step 3 : Next, you need to add your metrics or the things you want to measure. For this example, the specific metric is the number of organizations associated with your account. Click on Add option under the Metrics panel.
  • Step 4 : From the list of metrics, pick Users and Organizations > Users, then click on the Apply button. With this, Explore will depict the number of users in your account.
  • Step 5 : Next, you’ll slice this data to depict the name of each organization. Click on the Add button within the Rows panel.
  • Step 6 : From the list of attributes, you can opt for Ticket Organization > Requester Organization Name, followed by clicking on the Apply button. Explore will then depict a list of all your organizations along with the number of users in each. If there is a blank line at the top of your table, it showcases the users who have not been assigned to an organization yet. If you wish to get rid of this line, click on the Requester Organization Name attribute and exclude any NULL values.

To depict the users related to your Zendesk account along with their ticket requests, you can follow the steps mentioned below:

  • Step 5 : Next, you’ll supply the user names and their Zendesk role to the report. Click on the Add button within the Rows panel to finish this step.
  • Step 6 : From the result of attributes, opt for the Requester/user > Requester Name along with the Requester Role, then click on the Apply button. With this, Explore will depict a list of all the users in your account along with their roles.

If you wish to look at the standard reports, you can follow the steps mentioned below:

  • Step 1 : Click on the Admin icon within the sidebar, then choose Manage > Reports.
  • High and Urgent Priority Tickets : This report leverages high and urgent unsolved tickets as a baseline to compare against incoming new high and urgent tickets along with the daily rate of solved urgent and high tickets over the last three months.
  • Backlog Evolution : This report leverages unsolved tickets as a baseline to compare against incoming new tickets along with the daily rate of solved tickets over the last three months.
  • Resolution Times : This report depicts the resolution times for closed and resolved tickets over the last three months through three measurements of time: less than 24 hours, less than 8 hours, and less than 2 hours.
  • Incident Evolution : This report depicts tickets with the type set to Incident, that compares new incident tickets with unsolved and resolved incident tickets over the last three months.
  • Ticket Priorities : This report depicts tickets by priority groupings across the last three months. Tickets with normal and low priorities are grouped together along with the tickets with urgent and high priorities.

Every report within Zendesk can be immediately exported as either an XML or CSV file. However only administrators can export reports, not agents. To download a report you can follow the steps mentioned below:

  • Step 1 : Click on the Admin icon from the sidebar, and select Manage > Reports.
  • Step 2 : Click on the Reports tab and select a report.
  • Step 3 : You can choose either XML or CSV. The files will then immediately be downloaded to your computer.

To edit a report you can use the following steps:

  • Step 2 : Click on the Reports tab and locate the report you wish to edit and select the Edit option.
  • Step 3 : Amend the time period, title, and data series as and when required. Choose Update Report and then click on the Submit button to finish this step.

To clone a report you can use the following steps:

  • Step 2 : Click on the Reports tab and locate the report you wish to clone and select the Clone option.
  • Step 3 : This command appears when you hover your mouse over the report within the list of reports.
  • Step 4 : Next, enter a new name for your report and amend the time period, title, and data series as and when required. Select Create Report and then click on the Submit button to finish this step.

This article introduced you to Zendesk Reporting and 3 types of Zendesk Reporting Methods. Zendesk is one of the best tools for Customer Support. You can use its Zendesk Reporting services to analyze and create reports of your customer’s feedbacks and issues. This helps you in taking necessary action for the tickets raised by your customer. You can enhance the features of Zendesk by integrating it with BI tools like Power BI, etc. In such a case, you can use Hevo Data.

Hevo Data is a No-code Data Pipeline and has awesome 100+ pre-built integrations that you can choose from. Hevo can help you integrate data from numerous sources such as Zendesk, etc., and load it into a destination to analyze real-time data with a BI tool and create your Dashboards. It will make your life easier and make data migration hassle-free. It is user-friendly, reliable, and secure.

Want to take Hevo for a spin? Sign Up for a 14-day free trial and experience the feature-rich Hevo suite first hand. You can also have a look at the unbeatable pricing that will help you choose the right plan for your business needs.

Share your experience of understanding Zendesk Reporting in the comments section below!

Karan Singh Pokhariya

Karan has experience in driving strategic planning, and implementing data-driven initiatives. His experience spans strategic transition planning, data analysis for optimization, product development. His passion to data drives him write in-depth articles on data integration.

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How to create custom metrics in Zendesk Explore

Jude Kriwald

how to make report in zendesk

July 11, 2023

how to make report in zendesk

Explore is Zendesk’s powerful tool for building reports and dashboards from all of your ticket and user data. As covered in our three-part series on Explore basics , each report comprises metrics and attributes. Explore is full of metrics such as # of tickets, average wait time, SLA adherence rate and much more. But what happens when the metric you’re looking for isn’t there? Thankfully, Zendesk allows us to create our own metrics, known as Standard calculated metrics . Today, we’ll cover how to create our own metrics to build powerful, customised reports.

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For the sake of this article, let’s imagine a common use case.

Just about every contact centre under the sun will be measuring the volume of abandoned calls they are receiving each week or month. An abandoned call occurs when a caller gives up waiting on the line before being connected to an agent. Long wait times are inconvenient and annoying for customers, so it makes sense to want to keep an eye on this KPI.

What happens, however, if a user hangs up after just one second in the queue? Many customer service managers would prefer for this call to not count negatively against their KPIs, and it’s arguable that this caller didn’t hang up due to long wait times. In the industry, this is known as a “short abandoned call”. Our challenge today is to produce a new metric that measures inbound calls that were abandoned in the queue, excluding those users who hung up within 10 seconds of waiting. We’ll call these “long abandoned calls”.

Head over to Explore and open up a new report using the Talk - Calls dataset in Explore. 

See my previous article, Building Reports with Zendesk Explore - Part 1 to learn more about creating a new report.

how to make report in zendesk

Normally, to add a new metric, we’d click on the “Add >” button under Metrics. Before we can find our custom metric in that list though, we have to make it!

Click on the Calculations icon on the right of the page:

how to make report in zendesk

Then go ahead and click on Standard calculated metric - this is what Zendesk calls custom-made metrics.

how to make report in zendesk

First things first, let’s give our new metric a name.

how to make report in zendesk

Below the Name field, you’ll see a large and empty formula field. This is where the magic happens!

how to make report in zendesk

Zendesk Explore uses a language akin to SQL. Even if you have no SQL experience, follow along as you’ll likely recognise many of the functions from tools like Excel or Google Sheets.

In this box, we need to tell Zendesk exactly which calls we want our metric to include. We can begin by asking ourselves, in plain English, what are the conditions that any given ticket must meet to be included in our metric. They are:

  • It must be an inbound call
  • The call must be abandoned in the queue
  • The caller must have waited at least ten seconds before abandoning the call

That’s it! Pretty simple in English, now we just need to convert it into syntax that Explore will understand. Let’s begin.

An IF statement as our base

An “if” statement typically goes like this: If X is true, then do Y. It can also be a bit more convoluted than that. We could, for example, have multiple conditions, as our example does. If A is true, and B is true, and C is true, then do Z.

So we’ll use our IF statement to lay out those three conditions we detailed above. We’ll also use it to give as an output at the end (the “then do Z” part).

Go ahead and write IF on the first line. Don’t worry if you see a red error message after this stage, that will disappear once our formula is complete.

how to make report in zendesk

The first condition

Next up, the first of our conditions. To separate each condition from the next, we bookend them with parentheses (brackets).

After that, we need to look for the first field we want to limit the tickets by, Call direction. If you’re not sure what field you’re looking for, the best bet is to use the “select a field” button below, where you can search for fields.

how to make report in zendesk

Click Select a field, then search for call direction, then select it from the list, as above.

This will insert the element into your query, as below.

how to make report in zendesk

We now have an opportunity to define which calls we want to include, based on their direction. Go ahead and finish the line, so that it reads 

([Call direction]="Inbound")

how to make report in zendesk

Congratulations, you’ve just created your first condition! We’ve told Zendesk to only include calls where the call direction was inbound, and we’ve wrapped up the line with a closing bracket to tell Zendesk that that’s the end of that condition.

If we were to wrap things up here (including closing the IF statement), then our new metric would only include inbound calls.

The AND operator

If we jumped straight ahead to the next condition, Zendesk wouldn’t know how our conditions relate to each other. Think about the difference between writing 4 and 4, compared to simply writing 4,4, or 4 * 4. Similarly, in Zendesk, we need to tell it that we need the first condition to be true, and the second, and the third. To do this, unsurprisingly, we can use the AND function.

how to make report in zendesk

The second condition

Looking at our plain English conditions, above, we see that we now want to tell Zendesk to only include tickets that were abandoned in the queue. To achieve this, we’ll use the exact same structure as before: a field inserted from the Select a field list, followed by the value we require that field to have.

In this case, our field is Call completions status, and the value we want for this attribute is Abandoned in queue. Let’s add that to the next line:

([Call completion status]="Abandoned in queue")

how to make report in zendesk

We’re getting there! We’re now telling Zendesk to give us all inbound calls that were abandoned in the queue. Now we just need to tell it to only count those calls where the caller waited ten seconds or more.

The final condition

As before, go ahead and throw in another AND between your previous condition and the next.

how to make report in zendesk

Now we have a line waiting for our final condition. We’re going to use the Call wait time (sec) metric for this one.

We need to add “VALUE” before our metric that we’ll be pulling from (Call wait time), in order to tell Zendesk to extract the value of that metric.

Go ahead and add the line:

(VALUE(Call wait time (sec)) >= 10)

This tells Zendesk to only include calls in which the wait time was greater than or equal to ten seconds.

how to make report in zendesk

Super! You’ve now got all three of your conditions in there. All we need to do is wrap up the formula.

Finishing the IF statement

Now we’ve told Zendesk what to look for, we need to tell it what to do when it finds tickets that match all of these conditions. To do this, we use the THEN operator. Imagine this as a question. “ Then what”? Well, following from that, we can tell Zendesk exactly what we want to output. We can actually keep it really simple here and tell Zendesk to simply return the Call ID of each call that meets the above conditions.

Later on, we’ll use a separate button to tell Zendesk to count all of these Call IDs.

how to make report in zendesk

Finally, as we started this formula with an IF operator, we must always end it with a simple ENDIF. This tells Zendesk that this IF statement ends here.

This is what your formula should now look like, and you should have the green tick at this stage! If you don’t, go through and check that you didn’t miss a character, or paste it in from below.

how to make report in zendesk

Final formula:

THEN [Call ID]

Go ahead and click the white Save button at the bottom of the formula.

Congratulations, you just created your first Standard calculated metric, or custom metric in common parlance.

Next week we will talk about putting your new custom metric to good use and building on it even further.

how to make report in zendesk

WRITTEN BY OUR EXPERT

Zendesk Consultant

Jude Kriwald first learned to administer Zendesk in 2015 and has been helping businesses improve their customer operations as a freelance consultant since 2018. Offline, he can be found making maps, paragliding or exploring remote places.

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  • The beginner’s guide to Zendesk eDiscovery (Updated)

Onna Technologies, Inc.

Table of Contents

Introduction, what is zendesk, how do i collect data from zendesk, does zendesk have an api, zendesk ediscovery strategy.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in March 2021 and has been completely revamped and updated for accuracy, relevance, and comprehensiveness.

Welcome to the beginner’s guide to Zendesk eDiscovery, where we’ll cover everything you need to know about eDiscovery for Zendesk , a cutting-edge customer relationship management (CRM) software platform focused on helping businesses improve their customer experience. From an advanced ticketing system to AI-powered chat bots, Zendesk’s suite of products helps businesses automate their customer support efforts with an all-in-one solution. Managing 170,000 accounts across 160 countries, Zendesk hit its $1 billion revenue milestone in 2020 , cementing its status as a top CRM contender.

Our increasing acceptance of hybrid and remote workplaces has only added to Zendesk’s momentum. Working from a distance has pushed companies to prioritize connectivity and communication in all areas of business, and customer experience often sits at the top. Customers are, after all, the lifeblood of any business — which makes their requests, questions, and complaints (and support agents’ responses) critical data. A single Zendesk ticket can hold sensitive communications, attachments, and personal information that may become relevant for legal and regulatory reasons. Having a way to easily find and produce the right data is essential, which is why having a Zendesk eDiscovery strategy is quickly becoming a priority for many companies.

In this guide, we’ll help you understand how Zendesk works, what kind of data it holds, and how to collect that data. We’ll also leave you with a flexible Zendesk eDiscovery strategy you can adapt to your needs.

Disclaimer: Zendesk also offers a sales automation product, Zendesk for sales, but we will only cover eDiscovery for Zendesk for service in this guide.

Before we dig into Zendesk eDiscovery, let’s break down what Zendesk actually is. At its core, Zendesk is a customer service software that helps companies maintain their customer relationships with innovative tools known as the Zendesk Suite . This centralized, omnichannel workspace helps agents focus on customer interactions regardless of where they live.

zendesk-workspace_zendesk-ediscovery

Let’s dig into the main features of the Zendesk Suite.

1. Ticketing system

Zendesk’s ticketing system is the core of how Zendesk works. Between chat, email, social media, and more, Zendesk pulls all customer inquiries into one centralized hub called the Agent Workspace . Regardless of where conversations happen, Zendesk collects every customer submission, turns it into a ticket, and queues it up in one place for support agents to take care of. This makes it easy for your agents to track, prioritize, and solve customer inquiries and gives them a holistic view of the customer profile and journey. Each customer has a continuously updated “essentials card,” which shares their contact information, time zone, language, interaction history, and list of websites viewed.

zendesk-tickets_zendesk-ediscovery

2. Messaging and live chat

Zendesk’s messaging and live chat feature ensures businesses can stay connected with their customers on any channel. Whether you want to message a customer in the live chat on your website, on social apps like WhatsApp and Facebook, or through productivity tools like Slack, Zendesk allows you to frictionlessly continue the conversation from place to place. Additionally, you can create pre-automated, customized messages to get ahead of customers’ questions or even connect third parties in group chats to expedite answers and reduce back-and-forth interactions.

zendesk-chat_zendesk-ediscovery

3. Help center

Zendesk’s Help Center is where you can build a knowledge base to help customers find the information they need. The Help Center can also be used as an internal knowledge base for agents or IT teams. Whether it’s a how-to article or FAQ page, strong Help Center content empowers your customers and employees to solve issues on their own. You can elevate your Zendesk Help Center by customizing the theme, integrating it into your product or website, and allowing your team to update and publish new content over time.

Zendesk has also incorporated AI tools that offer insights into what information customers are searching for and that suggest content to add or update. Its generative AI features can also add and revise content plus create conversational responses to customers.

Stylized screenshot: linking help center article

Zendesk’s integrated voice software, called Zendesk Talk , enables you to take customer calls from the main interface so you don’t need to toggle back and forth between communication channels. Not only does this help keep things organized, but it also shows agents key customer information and previous interactions so they have context going into each call. Once the call or voicemail has concluded, it’s logged as a ticket, and the recording is attached for easy reference.

zendesk-voice_zendesk-ediscovery

5. AI chatbots

Zendesk’s generative AI-powered chatbots (previously called Answer Bot) help customers answer questions without agent intervention. Bots free up support teams’ time by automating common Q&As and can also detect relevant content in the Help Center to send along as well.

Zendesk’s bots can operate across multiple communication channels like email, messaging, or even third-party integrations like Slack . If a customer’s question can’t be answered, a bot can direct them to a support agent for more personalized assistance.

The platform trains bots on common customer inquiries and past conversations to help target help. You can also build custom bots for your organization.

blog-image-the-beginners-guide-to-zendesk-ediscovery-ai-chatbots

6. Community forum

Zendesk Gather allows you to set up a community forum where customers can engage with one another, post topics for discussion, share feedback, and ask questions. Organizations can seed the community with posts to promote conversations and moderate discussions. They can also monitor and manage members’ access, granting and denying access permissions to different groups.

Agents can escalate posts and turn them into tickets to continue conversations and view customers’ community activity in the Agent Workspace.

7. Reporting

Zendesk builds in robust reporting and analytics features that offer instant visibility into customer behavior. Organizations can gather data on customer support in every channel so they can address problems, identify key trends, improve agent productivity, and use insights to improve the customer experience. Pre-built and customizable dashboards give admins a way to slice and dice data easily and quickly.

8. Zendesk Sunshine

Zendesk Sunshine is a flexible messaging platform with an API that allows users to develop custom apps that connect to external customer data. Sunshine currently connects with more than 1,200 apps, including Slack, Jira, Salesforce, Teams, and Zoom, among many others.

Sunshine Conversations allows organizations to add additional messaging channels, third-party bots, and AI channels to elevate the customer experience, allowing customers to browse products, schedule reservations, and make payments in a conversation.

how to make report in zendesk

Now that you have an overview of the main features in the Zendesk Suite, let’s talk about how to collect relevant data.

When it comes to Zendesk eDiscovery, your most valuable data will likely live in tickets. Whether it’s an email with an attached document or a message with an image, different interactions from different channels are consolidated into a record of tickets. Each one holds a piece of the customer journey and may be vital to find, collect, and preserve for legal or compliance reasons.

The native option:

You can export Zendesk tickets to a JSON, CSV, or XML file if your account owner has this feature enabled. When collecting for Zendesk eDiscovery at scale, however, we don’t recommend relying on the native export feature, as there are a few major limitations:

  • Only customers that have the Support Professional or Support Enterprise plan have access to the export feature.
  • None of these exports include ticket attachments. The XML file will provide a link to the attachments but will not download the attachment itself, leaving a large gap in the conversation.
  • None of these exports include suspended tickets.
  • Only the JSON export option, not the XML option, is available for accounts with more than 200,000 tickets.
  • Accounts with more than 1 million tickets are downloaded in JSON format, but only in 31-day increments.
  • Customers cannot filter data before exporting it. So, even if you only need to sort through a certain ticket type or date range, you will have to manually sort through a massive data set.

When all is said and done, the JSON export is often the only export available, and its unfriendly formatting makes it extremely difficult to understand tickets in context. Not to mention that when accounts break the 1 million ticket barrier, customers lose access to data that’s over 31 days old.

how to make report in zendesk

Bottom line: The native export option gives users an incomplete picture of their data, making collections insufficient for Zendesk eDiscovery. However, Zendesk does offer API access to help alleviate these issues, which we’ll cover next.

Yes, Zendesk does have a Support API to help customers collect ticket data; however, you’ll need to work with a trusted eDiscovery partner to turn incomprehensible JSON files into review-ready data. By leveraging this API connection with the right eDiscovery partner, users can collect:

  • Tickets (open, closed, suspended, and deleted)
  • Attachments included in tickets
  • Labels for attachments and pages
  • Ancestors for the page/attachments
  • Ticket ID (#)
  • Ticket name
  • Ticket type
  • Organization
  • Ticket status
  • Ticket priority
  • List of tags

We highly recommend connecting to Zendesk’s API via a Zendesk eDiscovery partner. It’s the only way to ensure that you have full contextual knowledge of your tickets and can quickly identify what’s relevant to your investigation. Although the API connection might be the first step in successfully navigating Zendesk eDiscovery, there’s more you need to know.

Let’s get into some key considerations and best practices.

Whether you’re just starting out with Zendesk eDiscovery or have already taken some kind of initiative, each of these steps is crucial to building a successful eDiscovery strategy for Zendesk. We understand that no organization or legal team is the same, so we made this an adaptive guide.

Step 1: Understand your needs

As obvious as it may seem, the first step in launching a successful Zendesk eDiscovery strategy is understanding your needs. Whether you need to collect data for a one-off discovery request or are tasked with archiving millions of tickets, it’s important to investigate your organization’s relationship to Zendesk data. To do this, ask yourself questions like:

  • How big is my company?
  • How regulated is our industry?
  • How frequently do we encounter litigation?
  • How are my people engaging with Zendesk?
  • What personally identifiable information (PII) might exist in Zendesk?
  • How are we retaining data? Deleting data?
  • What data might we need to archive?

By asking these questions, you can start to get a more holistic sense of your information governance needs. For example, if your company has thousands of customers who regularly engage with Zendesk, and you operate in a highly regulated industry where sensitive information is being shared, you’re likely dealing with a large data set. Plus, you also face significant risk if the right information isn’t discoverable — or worse, if it’s been erased. If this is the case, you know that solely relying on Zendesk to accurately preserve and search for your data isn’t sustainable.

Whether you’re a large or small organization, if your Zendesk account holds critical information, it should be accessible, secure, and private. If you’re not confident this is the case, it’s time to reassess your Zendesk eDiscovery efforts.

Step 2: Anticipate future risks

You should be thinking about where your Zendesk environment is today but also where it’s going. When assessing your Zendesk eDiscovery needs, you’ll likely come across both short-term and long-term problems. While it’s important to solve for immediate needs, getting ahead of future risk should always be top of mind. A few potential legal and compliance gaps specific to Zendesk include these:

legal-and-compliance-gaps_zendesk-ediscovery

These are just a few roadblocks that organizations might hit down the line when conducting Zendesk eDiscovery. Depending on your size, industry, and use of the platform, these scenarios could look different. No matter your circumstances, one thing’s for certain: it’s best to know what you’re up against.

Step 3: Establish a company policy for Zendesk

After you’ve fleshed out potential Zendesk eDiscovery challenges, one of the best ways to get ahead of them is to establish a company policy for Zendesk. This is essentially your central documentation or “north star” for Zendesk data governance. From outlining retention periods for different data types to technical instructions on how to collect and filter data, this policy should lay the groundwork for legal and compliance preparedness.

If you’re ready to start drafting your Zendesk policy, we recommend covering the following areas as a start:

  • What types of tickets are there? What are they labeled?
  • What types of tickets pose a higher risk than others?
  • What sensitive data lives in what tickets?
  • What sensitive attachments might live in tickets?
  • What regulatory obligations require the retention of certain tickets?
  • What regulatory obligations require the deletion of certain tickets?
  • If this, then that scenarios (e.g., What is the workaround if an attachment needs to be saved but a ticket needs to be deleted?)
  • How to collect, preserve, search, and export data, step by step

Remember that every organization looks different, so this list can be expanded or condensed to align with your priorities.

Step 4: Implement an eDiscovery solution

Even with all of your policy ducks in a row, Zendesk still has some technical limitations that will stop you in your tracks. To ensure your Zendesk eDiscovery plan is the strongest it can be, you’ll want to implement a trusted eDiscovery solution to help you forensically collect, process, and search across all of your tickets.

Since litigation rarely comes up for many companies, far too many legal teams feel that an in-house solution is overkill. However, the opposite couldn’t be truer. Companies that don’t take a proactive approach waste countless hours, dollars, and resources waiting for litigation to strike. Not to mention, having the right information at your fingertips is useful for any internal investigations and audits that might arise. From service-level agreement discussions to customer service complaints to inappropriate language and harassment, Zendesk data can prove relevant in many scenarios.

If you’re ready to look for a Zendesk eDiscovery solution, at a minimum, it should have the following features:

  • An API connection with Zendesk to extract the most defensible data possible, including attachments
  • The ability to choose which Zendesk data you collect and preserve
  • Continuous sync and archive of specific data if needed
  • Powerful processing features including but not limited to metadata extraction, OCRing, natural language processing, and custom classifiers
  • Forensic-level search

Beyond these Zendesk-specific features, your eDiscovery solution should check some other crucial boxes as well. Flexible deployment, top-tier security measures, and compatibility with review platforms are just a few of the top things to look for in eDiscovery software. By bringing a Zendesk eDiscovery solution in-house, you’ll increase efficiency and cut back on spending in the long run.

Step 5: Make a long-term eDiscovery and preservation plan

As more and more apps like Zendesk emerge, the more complex information governance gets. For this reason, it’s important to have a sustainable eDiscovery solution that can adapt to any new technology that comes your way.

It’s best to look for a “master tool” for your entire tech stack to provide long-term value for your company.

Maybe right now your priority is to find something cheap and easy for Zendesk, but down the line, you may wish you’d considered a tool that integrates with Slack , Google Workspace , Jira , and the dozens of other applications you may use. From this lens, it’s best to look for a “master tool” for your entire tech stack to provide long-term value for your company.

You want a solution that will continually process, store, and archive the data you need, so you don’t need to worry about one-off, half-baked data exports. Additionally, a solution that applies retention periods to relevant data will ensure nothing slips through the cracks.

We hope our guide gave you a better understanding of the Zendesk platform, its discovery capabilities and limitations, and the steps to create a proactive Zendesk eDiscovery plan. Remember that executing your plan is an ongoing process and requires constant innovation and staying up to date on your organization’s use of the platform.

To learn more about how Onna collects data from Zendesk, see here .

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