Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Learn how to merge conditional ticket fields into one Explore attribute so you can report on every contact reason in a single view. Zendesk Analytics (formerly Explore) is powerful, but one area where it falls short is in handling conditional ticket fields with any ease. Many teams use these fields to capture detailed contact reasons under different parent categories.

Go beyond Zendesk Talk’s default reporting with five custom metrics (and one essential attribute) that reveal what’s really happening on your voice channel. Zendesk Voice (previously Talk) comes with a range of built-in reports, but most teams quickly find they need more flexibility as they try to drill into what’s really going on. The default metrics are often too broad to give real insight into what is happening in any meaningful way that can be actioned.

With AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT becoming more deeply integrated into knowledge work I wanted to run a like-for-like comparison in a competency close to my heart: data analysis.

There are three different things people mean by “Zendesk MCP”. Before comparing the options, it’s worth separating out these different use cases.

The advice says trust your team and delegate more. Here's why that rarely sticks on its own, and what tends to work better. If you've ever promised yourself you'd give someone room to run with a project, then found yourself messaging them for an update by the end of the same day, you already know the loop. You hand over the work with the best intentions. A day goes quiet, you start wondering whether it's on track or quietly going sideways, and before long you've asked for a status.

It's a familiar scramble. "The investor needs X report!", "The CEO wants to see how Y is doing!" Some poor soul has to rush around to pull all the requested data and deliver it to senior leadership, pronto. This usually means dropping everything else and spending an afternoon gathering data. Often by the time the report is viewed, the data is stale and leadership is left with an outdated picture of performance. Alexandre Naudin, Service Manager at Spash, described this well.

More than a sales vibe. When sales leaders come to us early in their journey, they often mention wanting to create more of a “sales vibe” or build a stronger “sales culture”. The problem is, vibe and culture don’t cut through when you’re asking a hard-nosed CFO for budget. And rightly so. The good news, and slightly ironically, is that those sales leaders are usually massively underselling what they’re trying to achieve.

Picture this: it's Monday morning, town hall is at 2 pm, and someone has sent the usual calendar reminder: "Don't forget to update the weekly support deck!" You open the slide, look at last week's numbers still sitting there, and start the ritual. Open Zendesk. Find the right report. Check the date filter. Copy the number. Switch to Slides. Find the right text box. Paste. Repeat fifteen times. Silently wish you were somewhere else. You tried delegating it to an intern once.

There are few things more frustrating for RevOps and sales leaders than poor-quality CRM data and deals that haven’t been updated properly. What makes it especially annoying is that it’s not a problem you can fix once. It needs active maintenance. Without it, standards slip. There’s an entropy to it. It’s also extremely common. We’ve had it in our own small sales team. There are countless Reddit threads on the subject.

Most sales leaders I've spoken to manage their teams on a one-week lag. The Monday meeting reviews last Friday's numbers. The pipeline review on Thursday looks at data that was entered into the CRM sometime earlier in the week, by reps who were also trying to hit their calls target at the time. By the time a problem becomes visible, it is already several days old. This is not a people problem. It is an infrastructure problem.