Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Also required | Workforce Management or Workforce Engagement Management |
| Access | Admin |
Two settings that decide how tracking behaves. One is usually right on; the other deserves a hard look.
Set them for the account
- In Workforce Management, click Settings in the sidebar and select Account settings.
- On the General tab, find the Tracking section.
- Set Turn on auto-tracking and Turn on task lock, then Save.
Both are on by default here, and this is what new team members inherit.
Or for one person
- Open People from the sidebar and go to Team > Team members.
- Select the team member and set the two options there.
- Tell them what each one means for them.
To change a whole team at once, tick several people on the Team members page and use the bulk options in the footer.
A person set individually stops listening to the account. User settings take precedence, and once somebody has auto-tracking or task lock set on their own profile, later changes to the account setting do not reach them. So an admin who changes it centrally and assumes everybody moved will be wrong about exactly the people who were configured by hand.
Auto-tracking: on by default, and usually right
It is activated for everyone by default. The first activity an agent does clocks them in and starts their day, so there is nothing to remember. Manual tracking depends on people starting and stopping timers, and the resulting data is not accurate enough to plan from.
Task lock does not lock the agent
The name misleads, and it is worth correcting before somebody rejects the setting on principle. Task lock allows an agent to remain clocked into a single ticket or task while opening other tickets. It does not stop them opening anything, and it does not tie them to an item until they finish it.
What it changes is the attribution: the time keeps counting against the item they are working on, instead of jumping to whatever they glanced at. An agent who opens an urgent ticket to check something, or looks up a colleague's case, still does all of that.
It is also something the agent does rather than something that happens. With the setting on, an option to lock the activity appears in the time tracker, and somebody has to use it. Admins can see when they did, on the Agent activity page.
Where it helps and where it does not
It helps most where agents open a lot of tickets they are not working on: checking, searching, referencing. Without the lock, that reading time is attributed to whatever was on screen, and long pieces of work look shorter than they are.
It matters less on a team that opens one ticket, handles it, and closes it. There the attribution is already clean and the setting changes little either way.
Consistency matters more than the setting
Whichever you choose, apply it the same way across a team. Because these are per-person settings, that consistency is something you have to maintain rather than something the product gives you: different tracking settings within one team make their numbers incomparable, and that is worse than either choice.
Not needed with status synchronisation
If you run unified agent status synchronization, task lock is beside the point. An agent who is not working a ticket is represented by their status, which stays as it is until they change it or open a ticket, so the time has somewhere to go without anybody locking anything.
Explain it once
What is recorded and what it is used for. Agents accept tracking they understand and resent tracking that appears.
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