Tracking time spent outside Zendesk

Plan requirement

Subscription Any plan
Also required Workforce Management
Access Admin

Work done in other systems still takes the day. Recording it is what stops your numbers being unfair.

Set it up

  1. List what agents do outside Zendesk.
  2. Create a general task for each kind.
  3. Show agents how to select one.
  4. Check the time is landing where you expect.

What is usually missing

  • Looking something up in another system.
  • Phone calls not made through Zendesk.
  • Talking to a colleague to resolve a case.
  • Writing documentation.
  • Approvals in a finance or ordering system.

Why it matters

Untracked work appears as idle time. Occupancy looks low, somebody concludes the team has capacity, and the schedule gets tighter for people who were already busy.

The data does not need to be perfect; it needs to not be systematically wrong in one direction.

Keep it coarse

A handful of tasks, not a code for every activity. Agents will select from a short list accurately and from a long one approximately.

Do not chase precision

Knowing that roughly a fifth of the day goes on non-ticket work is enough to plan with. Pursuing minute-level accuracy costs agent attention and produces worse data, because people stop bothering.

Ask the agents what is missing

They know what they spend time on that nothing records. That conversation produces a better task list than any analysis, and it makes them participants rather than subjects.

See also

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