Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Also required | Workforce Management or Workforce Engagement Management |
| Access | Admin |
One status, set once, understood by both products. Without it agents maintain their availability twice, and one of the two is always wrong.
Before you start
Omnichannel routing has to be set up and configured in Admin Center. Synchronisation takes agent statuses and activity data directly from it, so without omnichannel routing there is nothing to synchronise. You also need to be an admin, or in a custom role with the permission.
Turn it on
- In Workforce Management, click the settings gear icon in the sidebar and select Account settings.
- On the General tab, find the Unified agent status synchronization section.
- Select Agent status synchronization and click Save.
- Read the confirmation dialog, which sets out the impacts, then click Save and turn on.
- Map your workstreams to the unified agent statuses. This comes after, not before.
- Have an agent change status, confirm it appears, and tell the team what changed.
What it fixes
Without it, agents effectively maintain their availability twice. Nobody does that reliably, so one of the two is always wrong, and adherence is measured against the wrong one.
General tasks stop working
This is the consequence to settle before you switch anything, because it is not reversible in the ordinary sense. Turning synchronisation on makes general tasks unavailable in Workforce Management. A team that tracks meetings, training or admin through general tasks loses that mechanism the moment you save.
Turning it off again reverts to general tasks, and the historical unified agent status data stays visible but is not used for new activities. So switching back is possible and it is not clean.
Work out where that non-ticket time is going to be recorded before you turn this on, not afterwards. Historical general task data stays available, so nothing is lost from the past.
Four more things that change
- Your schedules need rebuilding. Shift settings and schedules that use general tasks have to be updated to use unified agent statuses instead, and republished. That is the real work of this change, not the toggle.
- Most Zendesk WFM automations stop. Only Send message and End day keep working. Automations that create tasks, switch statuses or track time do not run under synchronisation, so anything you rely on there has to be rebuilt against status data.
- Agents still start their day by hand sometimes. Working a ticket starts tracking automatically, but somebody whose day begins in a status that is not ticket work still has to click Start day in the time tracker. That is the step people forget in week one.
- Remap the Chrome extension. If you use the time tracker extension to map external websites to general tasks, those mappings have to be pointed at unified agent statuses instead.
Allow up to five minutes for the change itself to take effect.
Map straight after enabling
The mapping is what makes the data mean anything, and until it is done you have synchronisation feeding unmapped statuses. Do it in the same sitting rather than leaving it for the week after.
What agents notice
One place to set availability instead of two. That is a genuine improvement for them, and it is worth saying so rather than announcing a tracking change.
Adherence becomes meaningful
Comparing the schedule against real availability rather than against a status somebody forgot to update. That is when the number starts being worth reading.
It is also calculated differently. An agent counts as in adherence when their status is mapped to a workstream they are scheduled for, or when they are working a ticket from it, and also when they are online but idle. They are out of adherence in a status that is not mapped to their scheduled workstream, or on the wrong ticket. Offline - sign out is left out of the calculation altogether.
Untracked time becomes idle time, which is the more honest description: the status is always known, so the gap is somebody available and waiting rather than a hole in the data.
Check after any status change
Adding a status in Support without mapping it here reintroduces the gap. This is the pairing that breaks quietly.
Give it a fortnight before judging
Early adherence figures reflect people learning to use statuses properly. Reacting to week one measures the change, not the team.
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