Time tracking in Zendesk

Overview

When running a high performing support organization, it's important to measure agents and teams against the right and accurate metrics. Furthermore, especially if live channels constitutes one of your primary support channels, it's important to ensure that the teams are following their schedules in order to ensure that you hit your SLA and offer your customers the best experience possible.

To that end, Assembled supports automatic and manual overriding status for agents in Zendesk and uses that data to surface insights about agents and teams in the Team performance, Agent scorecard, Real-time agent analysis and other reports.

How it works

Once set up, Assembled automatically tracks what agents are working on in Zendesk and uses this information to display the status, derived metrics and whether or not the agent is adhering to their schedule in various reports.

Real-time agent analysis

In Real-time agent analysis (Monitor > Real-time agent analysis), the status will appear for each agent on Zendesk and whether or not that status is in productive adherence with their schedule.

Team performance

In the Team performance report you will have access to new metrics:

• Productive Adherence
• Hours in adherence
• Cases solved per actual hour
• Actual hours worked
• Utilization
• Total hours worked

Furthermore, if you have manual overriding enabled, you will also have access to the following metrics:

• Non-productive hours worked
• Conformance

Agent scorecard

When inspecting individual agents in the Agent scorecard, the user's state will show up in the timeline and also be used to compute productive adherence metrics over time.

Setting it up

Initial configuration

To begin tracking agent statuses in Zendesk, follow these steps:

1. Have a Zendesk admin install the Assembled Zendesk application from the Zendesk marketplace.
2. In the Assembled application, go to Configure > Third-party integrations > Assembled App for Zendesk, then click Edit settings on the card, select the checkboxes "I've installed Assembled's Zendesk app" and "Use the app for accurate adherence calculations", and click Save.
3. Configure the Zendesk states to map to the appropriate schedule events (refer to this guide).

Once you've selected "Use the app for accurate adherence calculations", you will see more detailed agent states in Configure > Agent states, listed under the platform Activity tracker for Zendesk (use the Platform filter to see only them). Below is a list of these statuses and their descriptions:

• Online (Tickets) – The agent’s primary tab (in a visible window) is on a Zendesk ticket page.
• Online (Zendesk Dashboard) – The agent’s primary tab (in a visible window) is within Zendesk, but not on a ticket page.
• Online (not Zendesk) – The agent’s primary tab is outside Zendesk, but the Zendesk tab is still open in the background.
• Offline – Zendesk is not open.

Advanced configuration

You have additional, advanced configuration options at your disposal by contacting your Customer Success Manager or support@assembled.com.

Manually override statuses (clock-in/clock-out)

This feature is a part of Assembled's Pro and Enterprise plan. Please see our Plans page for additional details about our Assembled plans and associated features, and please contact the Assembled team at support@assembled.com if you’re interested in using this!

If you would like agents to explicitly select an event to override task tracking, this feature provides the agents with a list of the available Events configured in Assembled for them to pick from. If no event is selected, Assembled uses the Zendesk status, but if the agent selects an event to override, Assembled will use that until the agent ends the event override.

Note: agents will stay in the manual state until they manually stop event override

If agents manually override task tracking, certain additional metrics listed above will be available in Assembled (eg. Conformance).

In Assembled, there will be an additional row called Manual Tracking in agents' Agent scorecard reports that will reflect these manual changes.

Set up:

• Reach out to support@assembled.com to enable this feature on your instance.
• Configure which events are made available to agents to select from in the dropdown from Configure > Event types.

  • Select the event that you want to display or hide in the dropdown to open its Edit event type window, and then select the option you want under Zendesk time tracking.

    

• This option is also available when creating new events, and by default new events will only show in the dropdown if they're default (a.k.a. non-productive events like Lunch) and will not show up for time off or productive events.

• All events that you have selected for manual time tracking will show up as a new agent state in Configure > Agent states. To ensure that adherence is properly accounted (or not accounted) for, make sure to map these new agent states to Assembled events.

  

Track work outside of Zendesk against ticket work

Automatically track Zendesk ticket work even when the agent is not in Zendesk. When this option is enabled, if agents navigate to different browsers tabs to complete tickets (eg. they need to access an internal tool or dashboard), that time continues to be tracked as work time for that ticket.

For example, if the agent opens a new ticket that is assigned to them for 30 seconds to read the message, opens another tab to do work for that ticket (eg. internal tool, dashboard) for 5 minutes, then goes back to that tickets for 30 seconds to respond, Assembled will track that as a total of 6 minutes worked on that specific ticket, rather than just the 1 minute when the agent is actually on the tab with that ticket.

In this scenario, agents can be in any of the following states:

• Online (Tickets)
• Online (Zendesk Dashboard)
• Offline
• The manually selected aux code

Time for that ticket will start counting from the first time the agent views an open ticket, until one of the following action happens:

• The agent logs out of Zendesk or Assembled
• The agent select a manual state if this option is available
• The agent closes the last open ticket they viewed

Generally speaking this option provides a more accurate view of time agents spend on tickets if agents have to do a lot of work outside of Zendesk to resolve issues. However, using this configuration option generally means that more hours of worked will be tracked by agent, which in turn affects certain metrics such as, but not exclusively:

• Productive adherence (Agent scorecard and Team performance)
• Actual hours worked
• Cases solved (per actual hour) (Team performance).

As a general rule of thumb, we recommend mapping Online (Tickets) to a productive state and Online (Zendesk Dashboard) to a default state when you have this configuration set up. Without this, the agent will be in adherence anytime they're logged in to Zendesk during scheduled work hours unless they've manually selected an aux code.

You can find more information on the metrics in Assembled which are impacted by time tracking in the List of Metrics and Definitions. If you wish to change which agent states count towards productive time, please visit the Configuring Agent State Mapping page.

FAQ

• Agents are showing up as Offline in Assembled but are actively logged into Zendesk. What should I do ?
  • Have the agent open the Assembled app in Zendesk --> are there any errors ? If so reach out to support@assembled.com.
  • Hard refresh their Zendesk page. Still not working ? Reach out to support@assembled.com.
• Agents are showing up as Logged in in Assembled but have Use the app for accurate adherence calculationsenabled. What should I do ?
  • Have these agents ever logged into Assembled ? If no, have them login for the first time as this should link their Zendesk account to Assembled. If yes, have them login and logout of Assembled. Still having issues ? Reach out to support@assembled.com.