Ticket Merger

Zendesk Explore, Actually Used

Zendesk Explore can answer almost any question about your support operation. That's exactly why most teams never get past the prebuilt dashboards.

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The Zendesk Explore mental model

Explore is built on datasets, and picking the right one is most of the battle. Support Tickets answers questions about tickets. Support Updates answers questions about what happened to them over time. Ask the two a question that sounds identical and you'll get two different answers.

On top of a dataset you add metrics (what you're counting), attributes (how you slice it) and filters (what you exclude). A report that looks wrong is rarely a broken metric. It's the wrong dataset, or a filter you forgot.

The five reports worth building

First reply time, median, by channel, by week. Median, not average. One weekend outlier is enough to ruin a mean.
Ticket volume by tag, monthly. The report that actually gets product changes made, provided your tagging is disciplined.
Backlog age distribution. Not backlog size. A stable backlog of old tickets is worse than a growing one that's being worked.
Solved per agent per day, with CSAT alongside. On its own, either number drives the wrong behaviour.
Reopen rate. The quiet quality metric. When reopens rise, tickets aren't being resolved, they're being closed.

Where the numbers lie

Duplicate tickets distort every one of those reports, and in different directions. That's why the dashboard so often feels impossible to act on.

Volume is inflated, so growth looks worse than it really is.
Cost per ticket is deflated. The denominator grew while total cost rose.
First contact resolution is deflated, because one problem needed two contacts by definition.
Solved-per-agent looks better than it is, since merged and quickly-closed duplicates are cheap solves.

Filter out tickets tagged closed_by_merge in your standard reports. It's a one-line change, and it moves every number closer to true.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Is Zendesk Explore the same as Zendesk reporting?

Explore is the product; Zendesk reporting is what people call the job. Zendesk analytics beyond the prebuilt dashboards means building Explore reports, and the prebuilt Zendesk reports cover more than most teams realise before they start.

Which Zendesk Explore dataset should I use?

Support Tickets for the current state of tickets, Support Updates for what happened over time. Most confusing results come from asking a time-based question of the tickets dataset. That's the whole trap.

Can Explore report on duplicate tickets?

Only on the ones already merged, via the closed_by_merge tag. Duplicates that were never caught don't exist as far as Explore is concerned.

Make the dashboard tell the truth

Remove duplicates and volume, cost per ticket and first contact resolution all start describing what actually happened.

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