Tracking time spent outside Zendesk

Work done in other systems still takes the day. Recording it is what stops your numbers being unfair.

Work done in other systems still takes the day. Recording it is what stops your numbers being unfair.

Set it up

1. List what agents do outside Zendesk: meetings, training, covering the phone, work in another system.
2. Create a general task for each kind.
3. Show agents the time tracker: the Workforce Management icon at the top right of Support, where they pick a task or click Start day.
4. Check the time is landing where you expect, on the Agent activity page.

Two things are worth saying out loud to the team. A day that begins with a meeting has to be started by hand, because auto-tracking only clocks somebody in once they open a ticket, chat or call. And closing Zendesk Support does not clock anybody out: that needs End day in the tracker, or the evening is recorded as work.

What you are moving is time that would otherwise be logged as Untracked, the name Zendesk WFM gives to any time on a page without a ticket.

Let the browser do it

The Zendesk time tracker extension for Chrome records time on websites you map, so work in another system lands in the right place without anybody clicking anything. You map to a general task, or to a unified agent status if you use those.

1. In Workforce Management, click Settings in the sidebar and select Extension tracking.
2. Click Map URLs and enter the addresses, up to 25 per task or status.
3. Pick the task or status they belong to, check the list, and click Map URLs.
4. Have agents install the extension from the Chrome Web Store and sign in, choosing Keep me signed in.

A mapped address covers everything below it: enter www.example.com and it is stored as www.example.com/*. Where two mappings both fit a page, the longer one wins, so a specific path can carry a different task from the rest of the domain.

Agents can click the Workforce Management icon in Support to see which task or status a page is being counted as, which is the fastest way to settle an argument about a number.

Decide what it may change

Under Manage settings on the same page:

• Unmapped URLs are not tracked at all by default. You can instead send them to a chosen task or status, or record them as untracked.
• Auto tracking records browser activity while somebody is signed in. Switch it off and agents start and pause the extension themselves.
• Update agent status lets the extension change the status in Support, and it is on for every mapping by default where you use unified agent statuses. This is the one to look at if statuses are changing when nobody expected it: turn it off entirely, or choose Only selected mapping and pick the addresses that may do it.

What is usually missing

• Looking something up in another system.
• Phone calls not made through Zendesk.
• Talking to a colleague to resolve a case.
• Writing documentation.
• Approvals in a finance or ordering system.

Why it matters

Untracked work appears as idle time. Occupancy looks low, somebody concludes the team has capacity, and the schedule gets tighter for people who were already busy.

The data does not need to be perfect; it needs to not be systematically wrong in one direction.

Keep it coarse

A handful of tasks, not a code for every activity. Agents will select from a short list accurately and from a long one approximately.

Do not chase precision

Knowing that roughly a fifth of the day goes on non-ticket work is enough to plan with. Pursuing minute-level accuracy costs agent attention and produces worse data, because people stop bothering.

Ask the agents what is missing

They know what they spend time on that nothing records. That conversation produces a better task list than any analysis, and it makes them participants rather than subjects.

See also

• Setting up general tasks for non-ticket work
• How Zendesk WFM tracks agent time
• Which Zendesk WFM numbers matter