Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

If you’re weighing up whether to build your own KPI dashboard or buy one, the decision probably feels more complicated than it did a few years ago. Modern APIs are easier to work with. Charting libraries are more prolific and fancier. AI tools can generate working dashboards in minutes. On the surface, the case for building dashboards from scratch has never looked stronger. In practice, the trade-offs have not changed as much as the tools have.

If you’ve spent any time in Zendesk Explore, you have probably run into the same limitation as most support teams. The standard metrics are useful, but they only tell part of the story. Ticket volume, first reply time, resolution time, CSAT. They are a starting point, not the full picture. As soon as you want to dig into how your team is performing against SLAs, backlog, workload, or automation, you need something more tailored to how your support operation works.

Gamification is the practice of adding game-like mechanics such as points, badges, leaderboards and rewards to non-game activities in the attempt to influence behaviour. The term took off in the early 2010s when websites and apps started using the idea to drive engagement. Stack Overflow is a well-known example: simple gamification mechanics like upvotes and reputation scores helped steer behaviour and improve contribution quality. It wasn’t just “fun graphics” - it was a system.

If you lead a support team, you already have plenty of data. Seeing how many tickets are coming in, how long customers are waiting, and whether your team is hitting SLAs is pretty straightforward (especially when using Geckoboard to monitor Zendesk KPIs in real-time!). But what’s often not so obvious is where things are about to go wrong - which conversations are quietly becoming frustrating, which customers are at risk of churning, or where agents are under the most pressure right now.

MTD Training, a leadership and management training provider based in Coventry, had plenty of data but very little shared visibility. Important numbers lived in Salesforce, spreadsheets and handwritten notes. Only a few people could access them, and even then, different reports often gave different answers. For Chief Operating Officer Kelli Grinter, this created a real challenge.

In the Autumn of 2025 we brought together Zendesk customers, implementation partners and friends of Geckoboard for a focused discussion on how support teams are preparing for 2026. Across the fireside chat, guest talks and informal conversations, one theme kept coming up. Teams are moving away from traditional volume reporting and toward clearer, more meaningful visibility into what really shapes customer experience. Here is a breakdown of what we covered and the takeaways you can use right away.

Like many of us, I’ve been curious about whether AI can actually take on real work. Not just write snippets of text or answer questions, but actually do things inside SaaS tools. So after a few nights of very bad sleep recently, I decided to put that curiosity to the test and see if AI could take over dashboard-building duties for me. If I wasn’t firing on all cylinders, maybe ChatGPT’s recently-launched Agent Mode could pick up the slack and build a dashboard for me using Geckoboard.

Woolworths MarketPlus includes some of Australia’s most recognised marketplace brands including Big W Market, Everyday Market, and Everyday Rewards. With customer service teams spread across Melbourne, Sydney, and a large operation in Manila, maintaining high standards and fast response times is a daily challenge. For Kieran Boyce, General Manager of Operations, surfacing performance data to the right people at the right time was a growing concern.

Your sales team collaborates in Slack, but your CRM data lives in HubSpot. When deals progress or leads come in, you want your team to know immediately – but the individual transaction alerts offered by HubSpot only tell part of the story. Within this post, we'll cover the different ways you can get HubSpot alerts into Slack so that your team is always in the loop and able to focus on the job of selling.

Getting timely alerts about your Zendesk support queue is crucial for maintaining great customer service. But if you've looked into Zendesk's native notification options, you've probably discovered they're quite limited for team-wide visibility. The good news is that there are several ways to set up Zendesk notifications that actually work for support teams. Whether you're using Zendesk Support, Talk, or Chat, getting the right notifications to your team can make all the difference.