Not the best Zendesk tool for sure

Hi Pedro Reis, thanks for taking the time to provide feedback. We'd love to hear more about any specific frustrations you have with the product. We're constantly working to make Explore better and better and customer feedback helps us to prioritize what to do next.
We'd love to hear from you in the comments here, or I'm happy to open a ticket on your behalf. Thanks!

Hi Rob Stack - if you can also look on the limitations of Rows Explore can produce. Currently it's set to 50,000 rows only and apparently you can't also export this on one go rather you need to splice it into 3 export which is pretty annoying.

Zendesk team always giving us an answer that Explore is not a reporting tool.

@Rob Stack It's just too hard to get anything from it when you want to customize your own metrics, time consuming and sometimes you don't get the results you want. It's not a user-friendly tool, I just gave up of using it, it's easier to extract data to excel and work from excel. Additionally, you won't get help from support for custom reports and metrics. 

Thanks for the clarification Pedro Reis and Jahn Jerenz Bronilla What I can tell you is that the Explore team are working hard to address any issues with the product while expanding its features. Feedback like yours is invaluable to help us do that. Explore is now the core reporting tool for Zendesk product and feedback like yours is how we make the product better. Please keep it coming in!

Can we expect this within the year or couple of months? Best if you can give us timeline to this Rob.

Thank you very much for the feedback.

@Jahn Jerenz Bronilla, you can join the Large queries EAP that will allow you to export up to 500K rows in the CSV format. 

@Pedro Reis, based on what you said you are not happy with the query customization. Which parts of the report building process bother you the most? Please share more details, they will help us to set the right priorities in making Explose better.

Hi Eugene Orman - thanks for sharing this but I think the information is not complete specially the costing.

Is there any cost involve on this one in the event I join the Large queries EAP? Thanks!

@Eugene Orman

It's too granular and too difficult for the average Zendesk user to build a report. I used Insights and it was much easier to use, and to be honest I miss it.

Sometimes too much is not the best way. I tried several times to build my custom reports, but I ended up spending a lot of time not getting the results that I wanted. Time is precious. Zendesk explore seem to be oriented more towards programmers than average users. 

Keep the interface simple guys, and add an extra layer via SQL language, so everyone can be happy. I seriously doubt that you have a lot of people using it.

I also found a lot of bugs using it, like reports that do not refresh on the Dashboard, intermediary values showing up on the X axis, etc,,

@Jahn Jerenz Bronilla, it is just a new Explore feature so there is no cost involved if you already have Explore enabled in your account. 

@Pedro Reis, thank you for the details. We are working on updating the Dashboard and Query builder UI. However, these are big projects and will take some time to be completed.

Does anyone have suggestions on alternative reporting tools for Explore?  We have a lot of data to report on and building reports is a very time consuming, frustrating process.  It's very slow to respond to each click and fatigue sets in quickly when I need to build a report because the interface is clunky and slow.  Insights was much better which doesn't help since we were forced off of the old tool after we had dialed it in.  

 @Peter Roberts I have used a tool called Metabase, but personally, I found that the better and faster way to manipulate data and build reports with Zendesk is to use Excel. I export data from Zendesk and import it on Excel, it took one week to set up my reports, but once it's done, it's easy to update, add, etc... The only caveat is the manual import, but I don't mind doing it, as it's much faster to manipulate data in Excel. 

The only decent analytics Zendesk has is the ones included with chat. I hope they keep it as they are very good.

In the past, I also used INSIGHTS, and it was pretty ok actually, not perfect, but ok. Much better than this new product that Zendesk has now for analytics. Sometimes product teams try to create a better solution, but it's completely the opposite - it turns to be worse. When you spend more than one hour building trying to build a simple report, that becomes frustrating, and people just start looking for alternatives. 

@Peter Roberts, 

While we are working on improving the current report building experience in Explore. What you can do to speed up the data selection process in the report builder is to avoid clicking on the "Apply" button but instead go from section to section without loading the report. Setting a filter will also help to load your report quicker. 

Here is a demo: https://share.getcloudapp.com/04uAXePR

Hi, 

Note that XML Export is not available for accounts with more than 200,000 tickets.

You can also try exporting your data into CSV via Zendesk. CSV Export includes the data like first reply time in minutes, agent wait time in minutes, requester wait time in minutes, Satisfaction Score, resolution time, etc. Those metrics might help you build a manual report faster.

However, Zendesk doesn’t export ticket descriptions, custom multi-line text, multi-select, date fields, and ticket comments into CSV. If needed, search for a third-party app. For instance, you can try this app, Export by Help Desk Migration - it exports all data mentioned above.

We did our data export for a small fee with Helpando Data Migrations and had all our custom needs met. 

Those guys from Helppando use Help Desk Migration for custom data transfer - there was a story with their former marketing manager who wrote about that here - but the Zendesk community deleted those messages because he deleted some of his messages and pretended that he is attached by others. And those guys keep adding minuses to other responses and submit answers from various fake accounts.