Zendesk Explore - Issue with unique article event for article creation / publish metrics | Community
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Zendesk Explore - Issue with unique article event for article creation / publish metrics

  • February 2, 2024
  • 1 reply
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Santino

Hi team,

I am posting this to the community forum as this has been an issue myself and our team have raised various times to Zendesk over the past two years - however, we've been challenged with facing the same issue and no feedback or resolution over the course of our tickets submitted by various teammates have addressed this issue. I would like to see if the community has faced a similar issue and/or if Zendesk has plans to address this.

 

Problem statement:

The core issue is that team publishing only captures the unique article event for article creation, as that event can only occur on an article once.

However, publishing events can occur on an article multiple times.

We are trying to capture how many unique articles were published in a given time frame and by which agents, not how many times the publishing event/click occurred in a time frame:

However, using any custom formulas and/or escalations to your team has only resulted in further investigations that have gone unresolved over time. 

I have included both a screenshot and a report our Knowledge Base team pulled from a report/query in Zendesk, where you will see the same article/ID come up twice for multiple articles, therefore inflating the count of published articles. Additionally, for some reason more articles also come up in this query/report and show as “0”. 

Question:

There are incidences where someone might "Publish" an article - then go back to make a change to the article. Zendesk is counting it as published "2" times for instance, instead of looking at the unique first-time published and then subsequent updates made:

  • Does Zendesk plan to address this or have any additional feedback on how to aggregate proper results for when an article is uniquely published for the first time?

  • Does Zendesk plan to have updates to metrics in Explore to account for when an article is "Updated" or "Amended" i.e. isolating the first time-publish and having a separate possible metric to capture subsequent updates or changes made to an article?

Our ticket history from our company will shed some light on this further as this has been raised a handful of times. Thank you very much.

    1 reply

    Brandon12
    • Brandon12
    • February 6, 2024

    Hey Santino,

    Thank you for your well-structured question!  I'm sorry to say I don't have any fast solutions here.  

    Your question touches on a nuanced aspect of tracking content lifecycle events in Zendesk Guide, specifically the challenge of accurately capturing the initial publication of articles while distinguishing these events from subsequent updates. The standard metrics and attributes available in Zendesk Explore might not always align perfectly with specific reporting needs, such as isolating first-time article publications from later revisions or updates. This is particularly true when the same article can be published multiple times, either as updates or translations, complicating the tracking of unique publication events.

    Given your detailed problem statement and the limitations you've encountered with existing reporting capabilities and custom formulas, I recommend a few approaches:

    1. **Custom Reporting Solution**: While waiting for potential updates from Zendesk on this matter, consider developing a custom reporting solution using the Zendesk API. Specifically, you could use the Zendesk Guide API to fetch article revisions and publication history. By analyzing this data, you can programmatically determine when an article was first published and track subsequent updates separately. This would involve:
       - Fetching articles within your timeframe using the Articles API.
       - For each article, retrieving its revisions history through the Article Revisions API.
       - Analyzing the revisions to identify the first publish event based on the `created_at` timestamps and distinguishing it from later updates.

    2. **Zendesk Explore Custom Metrics and Attributes**: Although you've tried custom formulas without success, there might still be room to refine these approaches by using more complex logic or combining multiple metrics/attributes. For instance, consider leveraging the `MIN()` function to identify the earliest publication date of an article within your dataset and then filter based on this to isolate initial publications.

    3. **Engagement with Zendesk Support and Product Teams**: Since this issue has been raised multiple times without resolution, continuing to engage with Zendesk Support and providing detailed feedback about your specific needs can help. Highlight how this limitation impacts your operations and make a case for the development of new metrics or features in Zendesk Explore to better support content lifecycle tracking. Sharing your ticket history and specific use cases can provide valuable context for your request.

    4. **Zendesk Community and Product Feedback Forums**: Consider sharing your challenge and proposed solutions in Zendesk product feedback sections. Engaging with the community can sometimes yield innovative workarounds and draw more attention to the feature requests, potentially influencing the roadmap for Zendesk Explore metrics and attributes.

    Unfortunately, without direct insights into Zendesk's product roadmap, I can't confirm whether there are plans to introduce specific updates to address this reporting gap. However, Zendesk has a history of evolving its products based on user feedback and the changing needs of its customer base, so highlighting this gap is an essential step toward potential solutions.

    For now, focusing on a custom API solution might offer the most flexibility and accuracy for your reporting needs, while ongoing advocacy for new features in Zendesk Explore could help address this challenge more directly in the future.

    Hope this helps!

    Brandon

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