With agent shifts, you can store each agent’s working hours to assist with ease of schedule and improved accuracy of time off reporting in Assembled. Gone are the days of bookkeeping shift information in spreadsheets or Templates!

Set up shift patterns

The Agent Shifts feature flow has been structured to ensure a straightforward and efficient setup process. After the initial setup, you’ll likely only need to revisit shift pattern creation and assignment if your team runs a shift bid or if you’re onboarding new agents.

1. Create shift patterns

First, go to the Shift patterns page to create shift patterns for your teams. You can also access this page by clicking on the Shift patterns tab under Company settings in the nav bar. This foundational step ensures that you have the required patterns ready for assignment.

Please note that only admins and managers can access the Shift patterns page.

Excluding events

When creating a shift pattern, you may input a duration to exclude per shift for time off reporting. This will be subtracted from full-day and multi-day time off event durations in Schedule analytics and Staffing timeline CSV export.

For example, you can exclude 60 minutes (or 1 hour) from each shift to account for a 1 hour unpaid lunch break.

2. Assign shift patterns to agents

On the People page, you can assign each agent to their designated shift pattern. This page offers flexibility to edit individual agent profiles or make bulk edits.

Using shift patterns

Shift patterns are utilized in two main forms: assisting with scheduling features and improving time off reporting accuracy.

Scheduling

Each agent’s assigned shift pattern will be visualized on key scheduling pages in Assembled, which are detailed below. The hash shading indicates hours outside of an agent’s working hours as defined by their assigned shift pattern.

Shift pattern assignments also surface in most locations where agent profile details are shown, such as agent popovers and page headers.

Staffing timeline

All agents’ shift patterns are shown on the Staffing timeline. For agents with no shift pattern assignment, there is no shading visualized.

Grey diagonal shading represents hours outside of the agent’s shift. The unshaded region represents the agent’s shift, or working hours.

Templates

Shift patterns populate dynamically based on the agents that are populating a Template.

My schedule

Shift pattern shading helps agents visualize their working hours more easily when viewing the My schedule page.

Time off requests

When you or your agents submit and approve full-day or multi-day time off requests, Assembled will use the assigned shift patterns to determine exact start and end times, ensuring accurate placement of time off events on the staffing timeline.

When submitting a full week time off request with shift patterns, Assembled will look at each agent’s assigned shift pattern to place the correct time off events. No more 24 hour blocks!

Full-day and multi-day time off durations will be reported according to shifts in the Schedule analytics page and the Staffing timeline CSV export. Excluded event durations are subtracted from the exported time off duration according to each shift pattern.

New columns added are Time off Duration (seconds) and Time off Description. Time off Duration accounts for event exclusions from the shift pattern.

Permissions

Only admins and manager role users can create and assign shift patterns to agents. If an admin or manager is assigned to a restricted site, they can only view, create, and edit shift patterns that are specific to their restricted site, and assign shift patterns for agents only within their restricted site.

If an admin or manager is assigned to more than one restricted site, they can select which restricted site a shift pattern is assigned to when it is created.

Please note that restricted site permissions compatibility was launched in February 2024, so restricted site managers and admins will no longer be able to see shift patterns that were created by non-restricted admins.

Frequently asked questions

When is a shift pattern effective after assigning it to an agent?

Once you assign a shift pattern to an agent, it becomes effective starting the next day in the agent's timezone, beginning at 12 am.

What happens when I edit shift patterns already assigned to agents?

Making changes to shift patterns that have already been assigned to agents will directly result in changes to those agents’ shifts and any pending time off requests. A confirmation modal will indicate how many agents will be impacted by those changes.

Past time off event reporting and already approved or denied time off requests will not be impacted by shift pattern assignment. Only pending and future created time off requests will be impacted.

How does the feature calculate time off events?

The feature works by calculating and showing time off events based on the shift pattern that was associated when the request was approved. In other words, once a request is approved, it will remain fixed regardless of future changes to shift patterns and shift pattern assignment.

For example, if an agent is assigned a Monday-Friday 9:00am-6:00pm shift pattern and their time off request for Monday-Wednesday is approved, three time off events of 9:00am-6:00pm on Monday-Wednesday will be added to that agent’s schedule. Once the approval happens, even if the agent is reassigned to a different shift pattern or the original shift pattern is edited (e.g. changed to Tuesday-Saturday 10:00am-7:00pm), that already approved time off request will not change.

It's essential to note that requests approved before shift patterns were assigned will not reflect that agent’s newly assigned shifts, and instead will follow previous time off request conventions.

How do I submit time off for overnight shifts?

Agents assigned to overnight shifts need to submit multi-day requests with both start and end times.

For instance, for an overnight shift pattern that starts on Monday at 9:00pm and ends on Tuesday at 6:00am and then continues from Tuesday 9:00pm to Wednesday 6:00am, when requesting time off for those two shifts, you need to submit the request as Monday 9:00pm to Wednesday 6:00am. Merely specifying Monday to Tuesday (without start and end times) will only account for time off from Monday 9:00pm to Tuesday 11:59pm.

What does the coloring mean on the shifts listed on the shift pattern page?

The shift gets a different color based on what time of day that shift starts/ends. This helps to visually see at a glance when the shifts occur. For example, your typical 8-5 shifts are in green, whereas an 11pm-7am shift will be purple.