Mapping unified agent statuses in Zendesk WFM

You map each unified agent status to workstreams, not to a single activity, and that is what makes their activities count towards adherence.

You map each unified agent status to workstreams, not to a single activity. Connecting a workstream to a status is what makes that workstream's activities count towards the agent's schedule adherence.

Map them

1. Open Workforce Management and click the Settings icon in the navigation bar.
2. Select Agent statuses mapping.
3. Click the name of the status you want to map.
4. Under Occupancy settings, decide whether this status counts as paid time, and if so whether it also counts as productive time.
5. Under Schedule adherence customization, tick the workstreams that belong to this status.
6. Click Save, then have a live agent set that status and check the right activity appears.

This comes after you turn synchronisation on, not before.

The occupancy toggles decide what the rate means

Each status has an Occupancy settings section with two toggles, and they are the part people miss.

• Log this status as paid time includes the status in paid time when the occupancy rate is calculated.
• Log this status as productive time appears only once paid time is on, and adds the status to productive time as well.

Productive time is a subset of paid time: all productive time statuses are included in paid time. So the pair is a decision about what your occupancy rate is a rate of, and getting it wrong produces a figure that looks precise and answers a different question.

Between them the toggles give three states, and each has a right use:

• Paid and productive. Work that is not a ticket but is still the job. Somebody handling social media outside Zendesk belongs here.
• Paid but not productive. Training and meetings. Necessary, paid for, and not the core of the work.
• Neither. Lunch is the usual one.

Resist the pull to mark everything productive. Unproductive time is a normal part of support work, and a day with none of it in the figures is not a good day, it is a broken measurement.

Why it is worth doing

Without mapping, an agent sets a status in Support and Workforce Management knows nothing about it. Adherence then compares the schedule against incomplete information and reports problems that are not real.

Map every status

Including the custom ones. An unmapped status becomes an unexplained gap in somebody's day, and those gaps are what make agents distrust adherence figures.

Where a status is not used, there is a second way out: admins can hide statuses agents do not need and reorder the rest, so the picker holds only what your team uses. A shorter list gets chosen from accurately, and there is less to map.

Match the meaning, not the name

A custom status called "Coaching" should be mapped to the workstream that holds coaching work, not to a generic away. The mapping is where the two products agree on what a word means.

Do it before publishing schedules

Adherence measured against a broken mapping produces figures nobody should act on, and the first impression of the product is that it does not work.

Redo it when statuses change

A new custom status in Support arrives unmapped here. That is a small change in one product and a hole in the other, with nothing connecting them.

Put status changes and mapping in the same task.

Check with a real agent

Have somebody change status and watch it appear. Reading the mapping table tells you what you configured; the live view tells you whether it works.

See also

• Turning on agent status synchronisation
• What unified agent statuses are
• Creating custom agent statuses