Time tracking in Zendesk – Assembled

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 constitute 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, Realtime and other reports.

In this article, we'll go over:

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.

Realtime

In the Realtime dashboard, 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:

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

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 Settings > Integrations > Assembled App for Zendesk, then select the checkboxes "I've completed the installation of the App" and "Use the App for accurate adherence calculations".
  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 Settings > Agent States. Below is a list of these statuses and their descriptions:

Important Notes

Advanced configuration

You have additional, advanced configuration options at your disposal by contacting your Customer Success Manager or support@assembledhq.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@assembledhq.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 the 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:

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:

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

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 work will be tracked by agents, 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 any time 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.

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