Staffing timeline

Use the Staffing timeline to check whether you have the right coverage at the right times, and to change the schedule when you don’t. It shows your forecasted volume, required staffing, and your team’s schedule together, interval by interval, so you can compare what you’ve scheduled against what’s required. It also flags schedule-rule violations and event conflicts, so you can fix them where you find them, by hand or with Schedule assistant.

To open it, go to Schedule > Staffing timeline.

Navigating the Staffing timeline

How the chart works

On the Agents tab, each bar is one interval, lined up with the columns in the staffing metrics below it:

• Staffed (required): scheduled staffing that covers what’s required.
• Staffed (surplus): staffing above what’s required.
• Deficit: the gap between what’s required and what’s scheduled.

By default, Staffed (required) is pale green, Staffed (surplus) is blue, and Deficit is orange. To use the Classic colors (cyan, pale green, and red), go to Configure > My settings > Preferences, and under Appearance, change Staffing chart colors.

The other tabs compare forecasted and actual volume, and service level. Which tabs appear depends on the channels you’ve selected: for example, New cases and Reopened cases for email, or Contacts for chat and phone. For date ranges longer than two weeks, the Agents chart shows lines instead of bars.

Staffing metrics

Use Metrics in the toolbar to add or remove these rows. If Distinct agents is much higher than Scheduled staffing, see Distinct agents and Scheduled staffing mismatch.

In Day view, each column is one interval. Interval length is your company’s base interval, between 15 and 60 minutes. You can see it under Configure > Company settings, in Defaults. To change it, contact our team.

In Week view, each column is one day. Daily required staffing is your total required hours divided by 8: the number of 8-hour days of work needed, not a headcount. Teams on longer or shorter shifts need fewer or more people than the number shown.

Filter the Staffing timeline

Filters decide whose schedules you see and what counts toward your staffing numbers.

• Schedule: the schedule you’re viewing, your primary schedule or a test schedule.
• Channels: one or more channels, such as Email, Chat, or Phone. With none selected, you see all channels combined.
• Add filter: narrow by Queue, Site, Team, or Skill. You can select more than one of each.

To find someone, use Search people. To show only certain event types, use Filter events. These change what’s shown in the schedule, not the staffing numbers.

How filters affect staffing numbers

When you filter by site, team, or skill, Net staffing compares that group’s schedule against everything the channel or queue requires. A deficit there shows how much of the need this group covers, not whether the queue is short. To see whether a queue is covered, filter by channel and queue only.

For example: your Tier 1 queue needs 20 people at 10:00, and three teams cover it, with 8, 7, and 5 people scheduled.

• Filtered by the Tier 1 queue: scheduled staffing is 20, required is 20, and net staffing is 0. The queue is covered.
• Filtered by the Tier 1 queue and Team A: scheduled staffing is 8, required is still 20, and net staffing is −12. Team A covers 8 of the 20 people the queue needs; the queue itself isn’t short.

Keep in mind: If required staffing is uploaded for a specific site, team, skill, or queue, filtering by it uses that requirement instead.

If you see both Scheduled staffing (matching filters) and Scheduled staffing (channel/queue), the first counts only agents who match your filters, and the second counts everyone in the channel or queue.

With no channel selected, Scheduled staffing, Required staffing, and Net staffing add up all your channels. To compare channels side by side, open Metrics and turn on rows under Channel level metrics, such as Required staffing (Email).

Save or share a view

• Filters are part of the page link, so you can bookmark a view or share it.
• To start every page with the same filters, set them in Configure > My settings > Preferences > Defaults. You can set defaults for Channel, Queue, Site, and Team.

Make changes to the schedule

• Add an event: drag across an agent’s row, choose the event type, and select Add event. If you set a Default event type above the schedule, events of that type are added as soon as you drag or select an empty cell.
• Edit an event: select it to change its time, type, or description.
• Edit a full day for one agent: right-click the row and select Add / edit events…. On a Mac, you can also Cmd + click an empty cell.
• Copy, paste, or delete: right-click an event or an empty cell.
• Work with several events at once: hold Shift and drag to select them, then move them with the arrow keys or remove them with Delete.
• Undo or redo: ⌘/Ctrl + Z to undo, ⌘/Ctrl + Shift + Z to redo.

Important: Changes aren’t saved automatically. Select Save, which shows how many changes you’ve made (for example, Save 1 change), or press ⌘/Ctrl + S. If you try to leave with unsaved changes, Assembled asks first.

For copying to multiple agents, paste mode, and more, see Creating and modifying schedules.

Review violations and conflicts

If you use scheduling rules, the page shows how many schedule-rule violations the current view has, such as 3 schedule-rule violations. Select Show 3 schedule-rule violations to highlight them on the schedule, and hover over one to see which rules are broken. If events overlap, select the event to see the conflict and choose which to keep.

To rebuild or improve a schedule for a date range, use Schedule assistant. It places events using your scheduling rules and forecast, and works on current or future date ranges of up to 31 days. For details, see Schedule assistant.

Review or undo past changes

Every saved change to the schedule is recorded in scheduling history, so you can see who changed what and roll it back. To open it, select the More actions menu next to Configure staffing, then Scheduling history. For the steps, see Scheduling history.

How required staffing is calculated

Select a single channel (and up to one queue), then select Configure staffing to see or change the settings that turn your forecast into required staffing, such as your service level goal, productivity, and Unproductive shrinkage.

• Chat, phone, SMS, and social: Assembled uses Erlang C, a standard staffing model for live channels, with your service level target, unproductive shrinkage, and maximum occupancy. Chat, SMS, and social also account for concurrency.
• Email: with the default Complete all work in the interval they arrive in option, required staffing = forecasted volume ÷ (productivity per interval × (1 − unproductive shrinkage)). Productivity per interval is your hourly productivity scaled to the interval length, so for a 30-minute interval it’s half your hourly productivity.

For example: you forecast 30 emails in a 30-minute interval, an agent handles 12 emails an hour, and unproductive shrinkage is 25%. Productivity per interval is 6, so required staffing = 30 ÷ (6 × 0.75) = 6.7 people for that interval.

To spread email work across your SLA window instead, choose Evenly distribute work across the SLA window (recommended) under Requirements calculation. For how that option works, see Staffing requirements for email and back office.

For email, forecasted volume includes reopened cases, weighted by the Reopens multiplier in Configure staffing. If your company uses the case lifecycle model, you choose whether each channel’s volume counts cases or units of work in Configure > Additional settings, under Volume calculation. For details, see Staffing parameters.