Explore — the Support dashboard – Gravity CX

Ref: D02 · Track: Admin & Reporting · Time to complete: ~7 min

Why this matters

Explore is Zendesk's reporting tool. The Support dashboard is the pre-built starting point — it ships with a set of queries and visualisations that answer the questions most support teams need answered. Learn the pre-built first; customisation comes later.

Getting to Explore

From the main nav, click Explore (the bar-chart icon in the sidebar). You land on the dashboards home. Pick Zendesk Support (or your workspace's equivalent pre-built).

What's on the Support dashboard

Typical tabs:

Overview

Total tickets created (chosen period).
Total solved.
Backlog (open + pending).
CSAT score.
Trend lines comparing this period vs previous.

Ticket volume

By channel (email, web form, chat, Talk, API, etc.).
By brand (if multi-brand).
By group.

Response and resolution times

First reply time — median, 90th percentile.
Full resolution time.
Broken out by priority.

Agent performance

Tickets solved per agent.
First reply time per agent.
CSAT per agent (take with care — small samples mislead).

Backlog

Age of open tickets.
Breached SLAs.
Pending tickets oldest first.

Satisfaction

CSAT trend.
Recent feedback comments.
Response rate.

Filters that unlock real value

Every dashboard respects filters. Spend a minute setting these properly:

Date range — last 7 days, 30 days, quarter. Pick for the question at hand.
Brand / group / agent — focus the dashboard to your team.
Ticket priority / channel / form — narrow to the slice you care about.

Filter settings stick for the session but not permanently — save a copy of the dashboard with your preferred filters for speed.

Reading the dashboard — the mindset

The dashboard answers "what's happening", not "why". Use it to:

Notice anomalies. Ticket volume doubled yesterday — investigate.
Track trends over time. First reply creeping from 2h to 3h over six weeks — action.
Spot outliers. One agent has dramatically different CSAT — coach or celebrate.
Report up. Weekly / monthly snapshots for leadership.

Avoid: staring at the dashboard all day. It's not a live ops tool. Use live dashboards (D05) for that.

Drilling in

Most dashboard widgets are clickable: - Click a ticket-count number → Explore opens a detail query showing the underlying tickets. - Click a trend line's spike → filter by that day's tickets. - Click a CSAT bar → see the individual responses.

This is the fastest way to go from "something looks off" to "here's which tickets".

Customising the dashboard

If the pre-built doesn't quite fit:

Clone it — duplicate into your workspace. Rename.
Add/remove widgets — drag from the sidebar.
Create new queries — Explore has a query builder (metrics + attributes + filters).
Save and share — see D04 for scheduling/sharing.

Common custom queries: - Tickets created vs solved per day (the classic health chart). - Reopen rate (tickets solved then reopened / total solved). - Tickets per custom field value (see D03). - Average interactions per ticket.

The metrics that actually matter

Resist vanity metrics. Focus on:

Backlog age — are old tickets piling up?
First reply time — customer experience leading indicator.
CSAT — customer experience lagging indicator.
Reopen rate — quality of first-time resolution.
Solved per agent per day — capacity planning.

A dashboard showing these five, filtered by team, is 80% of what most managers need.

Gotchas

Explore data refresh. There's a lag (often 1 hour) between prod and Explore data. Real-time needs live dashboards (D05).
Dashboards vs queries. A dashboard is a set of queries + visualisations. A query is the underlying data pull. You can share either.
"Average" can lie. Median usually tells you more for reply-times. Toggle between them.
Editing the pre-built is irreversible-ish. Clone it first; edit the clone.
Data access depends on role. Not everyone sees everything — confirm your role has Explore edit/view as expected.

Quick check — have you got this?

First reply time is trending up. Dashboard shows median 2.1h for this week. Where do you dig next?
You need a ticket-volume report filtered to Brand A only. Where do you start?
Is the Support dashboard real-time?

Answers

- Filter by team or channel to see which slice is slowing. Drill into specific tickets contributing to the tail. - Open Support dashboard → set brand filter = Brand A → review. Save a copy if you'll come back to it. - No — typically ~1 hour lag. Use live dashboards for real-time ops.

D03 — Drilling into custom fields in reports
D04 — Scheduling and sharing dashboards
D05 — Live dashboards for Talk