Setting up general tasks for non-ticket work

Work that is not a ticket and still takes the day. Without it your numbers say people were idle, and a break is paid time but not productive time.

Work that is not a ticket and still takes the day. Without it your numbers say people were idle, and a break is paid time but not productive time.

Set them up

1. In Workforce Management, click Settings in the navigation bar and select General tasks.
2. Create a task for each kind of non-ticket work, and give it a colour. That colour is what agents and managers see on the Agent activity page.
3. Under Occupancy settings, decide whether to log this general task as paid time and whether to log it as productive time. Those two toggles are what the occupancy figure is built from.
4. Under Talk status settings, set the voice status an agent shows while clocked in to this task.
5. Under Schedule adherence customization, connect the workstreams that should count towards adherence during it.
6. Give the right teams permission, and tell agents when to use each task.

Step three is the one that decides whether the numbers make sense. A break is paid time but not productive time. Training and meetings are usually the same: paid, and counted as unproductive, because they are necessary rather than the core of the job. Marking them productive flatters the occupancy figure and makes it useless for comparison.

Why they matter

Agents spend real time on things that are not tickets: training, meetings, coaching, writing articles, covering the phone. Without a task to record that, the time appears as unproductive.

Then occupancy looks poor, and somebody draws a conclusion about the team that is wrong.

The ones worth having from the start

• Training and coaching.
• Meetings.
• Writing or reviewing knowledge base articles.
• Project work.
• Helping a colleague.

Keep the list short

Six or eight. A long list means agents pick approximately, and approximate data is worse than coarse data.

The aim is to distinguish work from idle, not to build a timesheet.

Name them as agents would say them

"Training" rather than "Non-productive activity code 4". They pick from this list several times a day.

Schedule them, do not only record them

If training is scheduled, the forecast knows those people are unavailable and staffs accordingly. Recording it afterwards explains the past; scheduling it plans the present.

Watch the total

Time on general tasks is your shrinkage. If it is much larger than assumed, your staffing model is optimistic and this is where you find out.

See also

• How Zendesk WFM tracks agent time
• Tracking time spent outside Zendesk
• Which Zendesk WFM numbers matter