Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Also required | Workforce Management or Workforce Engagement Management |
| Access | Agent |
The workforce terms in the sense Zendesk uses them. Several sound like plain English and are not: adherence is not doing well, and high occupancy is not good.
Planning terms
| Forecast | Predicted contact volume, by interval. |
| Schedule | Who works when, generated against the forecast. |
| Shift | One person's working period, including breaks and activities. |
| Activity | What somebody is scheduled to be doing: tickets, training, a break. |
| Location | A place with its own operational hours and time zone. It does not hold a holiday calendar. |
| Concurrency | How many chats one agent handles at the same time. One to two is the usual setting. |
|
Full-time equivalent FTE |
A unit for expressing workload as a number of full-time people. |
| Intraday | What happens inside a single day: the tasks, and the start and end times. |
Measurement terms
| Adherence | How closely actual work matched the schedule. |
|
Occupancy Occupancy rate |
The proportion of paid time spent on support-related activities rather than non-support ones. That is the name it carries in the reports. |
| Shrinkage | Limits on how much work an agent is available to take. Internally that is lunch breaks, training, scheduled meetings and work done between calls; externally absence, holiday, sickness, lateness and leaving early. There is no shrinkage metric in the reports, so you assemble it from scheduled time against the general task figures. |
| Attendance | Total hours worked inside the scheduled time, customer contact and breaks together. |
| General task | Work that is not a ticket but still takes time. |
Workstream terms
| No workstreams | A ticket that matched no workstream's conditions. Usually a gap in the conditions rather than a ticket that does not belong anywhere. |
| Multiple workstreams | A ticket that matched two or more at once. Worth looking at, because it means the conditions overlap. |
Three that mislead
Adherence. It measures following the schedule, not working well. An agent who stayed on a difficult call through a scheduled break scores badly and did the right thing.
Occupancy. High is not better. Zendesk follows the COPC benchmark of 75 to 85 per cent and says so in the metric itself: above 85 per cent agents are busy with little idle time, which leads to burnout, and below 70 per cent there is significant idle time between contacts. It is a band to stay inside, not a number to maximise.
Team. A workforce team, not a Support group. They are maintained separately and often differ.
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