What Zendesk WFM automations do

Plan requirement

Subscription Any plan
Also required Workforce Management
Access Admin

Rules that act on schedules and time data. Useful for the routine, and not a substitute for a person.

What they can do

  • Notify somebody when coverage falls below a threshold.
  • Flag adherence that is well outside the normal range.
  • Approve or route time off requests by rule.
  • Alert when a schedule is unpublished close to its start.

Where they earn their place

Noticing things a person would only see by looking. Nobody checks coverage for the fortnight after next, and an alert when it drops below target is genuinely useful.

The test for building one

Does somebody act when it fires? If the answer is that they look at it, it is a notification rather than an automation, and it will be ignored within a month.

Do not automate the judgement

Declining time off, or flagging individuals on adherence, is a decision about a person. Automating it removes the context that makes the decision fair, and people notice immediately.

Automate the noticing, not the deciding.

Keep the list short

Two or three rules that matter. Every additional alert dilutes the others, and a team receiving six notifications a day reads none of them.

Send to a person, not a channel

An alert with a named recipient gets acted on. One posted to a shared channel is everybody's and therefore nobody's.

Review what fired

After a month, look at how often each rule triggered and what happened. Rules that fire constantly need adjusting; rules that never fire are not doing anything.

See also

Was this article helpful?

0

Still stuck?

Our support team will take a look with you.

Comments

0 comments

Article is closed for comments.