Step into the world of automatic 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.
You will need to have Schedule - Manager (Full Access) 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 their default 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. If you hover over an agent's picture you also have access to a snapshot of what Team, Location, Workstreams and Zendesk Groups they're assigned to. Clicking on any will take you directly to that specific page in case you need to edit.
- Below the filter selector, you have a search box that allows you to search for a specific agent.
- The General Tasks Panel button will open a list of your General Tasks and Time Off for that day.
- The Day/Week View: If you select the "Day" dropdown menu you will be able to switch to Week View. Alternative to this, if you double click the date you will alternate between the Day/Week View.
- The Workstreams Staffing Panel button 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 a 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.
- To automatically generate a Schedule for you, simply click on GENERATE on the top right. We will cover this in detail in the next section of this article.
- To publish the Schedule you need to click on the PUBLISH button. The Schedule will then appear on your Agents' schedule app in Zendesk. If the button says PUBLISHED with a faded color, it means everything is published and there's no need to press it.
- You can also see a current-time indicator in blue on your main Schedule.
Note: Time-Off entries will be automatically published.
Generate a 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 the button Generate.
- 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.
- After it's done and it shows up on your screen, click the Publish button so your agents can see their schedule on the Agent Schedule app in Zendesk.
You can also generate a shift for one agent only or for a group, location or team instead of generating a schedule for your entire roster. To do this just hover over an agent and you'll be able to see a + button, clicking on it will generate a shift just for that agent. And don't forget to hit that Publish button as well.
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.