Step into the world of automagic and see how your Forecast is transformed into a detailed schedule complete with breaks, channel-specific assignments, and more. It’s simple to tweak on the fly to keep pace with your team’s ever-changing needs.
- Access Automated Schedule
- Read Automated Schedule
- Generate Automated Schedule
- Edit Automated Schedule
- Time Off
You will need to have administrator permissions to access the Automated Schedule feature. Once you have the right access level, follow these steps:
- Hover over the Schedule icon
on the navigation bar. - Click on Auto Schedule.
Note: if you have our Enterprise plan, you will have two options to chose from, you can use our Automated Schedule or our Manual Schedule.
Now that you are here, let's learn what information you can see in our Automated Schedule (by default, you will see an empty view at first):
- At the top left of the main section, you have a date picker that shows you the current date and the arrows that will take you to the previous and next days.
- On the left side, you will see all of your users organized by your Zendesk Groups. You can also filter them by Team, Location, or you can view All Agents. You can collapse each user group to remove their Schedule from the main view.
- Below the filter selector, you have a search box that allows you to search for a specific agent.
- General tasks button
which opens a section where you can see a list of scheduled General Tasks and the number of many agents you have assigned to them at each time interval for that day. - Scheduled vs Forecasted button sf, will open a list of your Workstreams. If you see that section empty, it means you will need to create them first. Also, this data can be viewed in few ways - on the bottom right you have a selector with the following options:
- Scheduled: shows you the number of people you have scheduled on each Workstream and General Tasks.
- Forecasted: shows you the number of people we have forecasted you need for that day for each Workstream.
- Scheduled vs Forecasted: the difference between the number of people you have forecasted vs the number of people that are scheduled (+ value will show overstaff of scheduled agents and - value will show understaff compared to the forecasted FTE).
- Charts: a more comprehensive chart view of how many people you have scheduled, how many people are forecasted to work, and your shrinkage.
- Smart Highlighting: highlights the cells where you might have fewer people working than you should or if there are too many.
- On the top right, you have a
icon that will open a sidebar on the right containing all of your Workstreams 
, General Tasks 
, and Time Off Reasons 
. You can close/open each group by clicking on the appropriate icons. - To automatically generate a Schedule for you, simply click on
on the top right. We will cover this in detail in the next section of this article. - You can also see a current-time indicator in blue on your main Schedule.
Before you generate a Schedule make sure you have first configured your Organization Structure features:
- Workstreams: the type of work your agents do.
- Locations: when and how your agents do their work.
- Time Off Reasons: what kind of time off your agents can take.
- Teams (optional): who your agents work with and who they report to.
Once you are all set, let's get that automation to work!
- Click thebutton.
- Select the time interval for when you want a schedule to be created.
- Click Run.
- Notice that Generate button has now changed to Generating and it has a loading icon. This may take some minutes to generate, depending on the size of your roster.
When schedule generation is completed you will see an assigned shift next to each agent and the shift will contain the tasks they need to work on at a particular time along with the general tasks you configured on the layouts in Locations.
If you need to edit the Automated Schedule once it has been generated, you can perform these actions:
- Add new tasks - Click on the plus button on the left of the Generate button, click on any of the workstreams or general tasks contained there and drag them to the shift of your choosing.
- Resize current tasks - you can move your mouse cursor to the beginning or end of a task and drag them. You'll add 15 minutes increments each time you drag.
- Delete current tasks - You do the same as if you were resizing but you resize them in order to cover the previous or next task on the shift.
Note: all the changes made to the schedule are saved automatically and your agents will be able to see those changes on their Agent Schedule app in Zendesk.
You will be able to add Time Off manually from the taskbar on the right.
- Click the
on the top right - Locate the
icon. If you need to add any other Time Off Reasons, check out the article here. - Click and drag on the Time Off Reason you wish to add and drop it onto the agents that are requesting time off shift.
- To Delete a Time Off click on it and you will see a Delete button.
Important: You are not able to edit any intraday task on a shift if you have a time off. You can only have one time off per shift. You can only add time off when you have a shift already scheduled. Please note that at this time you can request only a full day Time off.