Importing historical volume

Giving the forecast a past to learn from, and the fastest way to make a new deployment useful. Importing replaces the data rather than adding to it.

Giving the forecast a past to learn from, and the fastest way to make a new deployment useful. Importing replaces the data rather than adding to it.

Import it

1. In Workforce management, click Forecasting in the sidebar, select Forecast scenarios and choose the workstream.
2. In the Historical volume panel, set the data source to Imported data and download the Import volume template.
3. Fill the template from your own history. The times are UTC, in fifteen-minute steps starting at 00:00:00, with no gaps: an interval with no contacts is a zero, not a missing row. Delete the example row.
4. Clean it: take out the abnormal periods.
5. Upload the file and click Save.
6. Generate a forecast for a period you remember and compare.

The interval rule is the one that costs an afternoon. A row at 09:10 is an error, not a rounding, and a spreadsheet that has helpfully turned colons into semicolons produces the same result.

Importing replaces rather than supplements: from then on Zendesk WFM uses only your imported data for that workstream and does not combine it with the Zendesk history. Switching the data source back is possible at any time.

Why it is worth the effort

Without history the forecast has nothing to learn from and stays poor for months. With a year imported, it is usable in a week.

That difference decides whether the team trusts the tool or writes it off early.

Interval level, not daily

Daily totals cannot produce the shape of the day, and the shape is the entire reason to forecast. If your history is only daily, the import will be much less useful.

Exclude the abnormal

An outage, a campaign, the week a competitor was down. Importing those teaches the forecast that they are normal, and it will predict them again next year.

Removing them is the difference between a year of history and a year of noise.

How much to import

Two weeks is the minimum the import accepts, and two years is what Zendesk recommends for accuracy. In practice a year is often the honest amount: enough to capture seasonality without describing a business that no longer exists, because two years of a company that has since doubled is not more information.

Six months is all that arrives by itself

When Workforce Management is switched on, six months of your Zendesk ticket history comes across and no more. That is the real reason to import: not because the automatic history is wrong, but because it is short. Contact pluscloud support if you want a longer period brought over from Zendesk rather than imported from a file.

A second import lives in the same place

Since September 2026 Forecast scenarios also accepts a forecast of your own, and the two imports are easy to confuse because they sit together. This page is about the past: you give Workforce Management history and it works out the future. The other one is about the future: you upload the numbers you already trust and Workforce Management uses them instead of calculating its own.

It comes in two shapes. Upload only your expected inbound volume and Workforce Management still works out the staffing from it. Upload volume and the staffing numbers you have settled on, and you own both. That second one is for teams whose own aggregation and rounding rules produce a number they are not willing to have recalculated.

So the question to answer first is which of the two you are doing. Importing history where you meant to import a forecast gives you a plausible answer built from the wrong thing, and it looks perfectly normal.

Check it before relying on it

Forecast a past month and compare it with what happened. If that comparison is poor, the import is wrong somewhere and no algorithm will fix it.

See also

• Setting up forecasting
• Why my forecast is far off
• Zendesk WFM product limits