Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Also required | Workforce Management or Workforce Engagement Management |
| Access | Admin |
Rules that act on schedules and time data. Useful for the routine, and not a substitute for a person.
What triggers one
The list is short and specific, and all four are about an individual agent against their own schedule.
| Clocked into | Runs a set time after the agent clocks into a task. This is the default. |
| Early to | Runs before their scheduled start or end time. |
| Late to | Runs after their scheduled start or end time. |
| Out of adherence | Runs when their activity deviates from the schedule. |
There is no trigger for coverage falling below a threshold, and none for a schedule still being unpublished. If you want those noticed, somebody has to look.
What it can then do
| Clock out user, End day | Takes the agent out of the current activity and ends their day, keeping the timesheet |
| Clock out user, Delete timesheet, End day | The same, and removes the activity from the agent activity page and the related reports |
| Send a message | To All team members in your scope, the Affected agent, the Manager or Specific users, as a push notification in their Agent Workspace in Zendesk Support |
| Shift user to general task | Unavailable with unified agent status synchronization |
| Shift user to untracked time | Unavailable with unified agent status synchronization |
The two ending actions are the answer to agents who forget to clock out, which is otherwise the most common source of nonsense in the day's figures. Note which one deletes the timesheet: that removes the record rather than correcting it.
Approving or routing time off is not on this list. That is a separate feature with its own rules.
Where they earn their place
Noticing something about one agent's day that nobody is watching for. An agent clocked into one task far longer than the work should take, or a start time missed, are the cases these were built for.
The test for building one
Does somebody act when it fires? If the answer is that they look at it, it is a notification rather than an automation, and it will be ignored within a month.
Do not automate the judgement
Flagging individuals on adherence is a decision about a person, and Out of adherence makes it one click away. Automating it removes the context that makes the decision fair, and people notice immediately.
Send those to the manager rather than to the agent, and automate the noticing rather than the deciding.
Keep the list short
Two or three rules that matter. Every additional alert dilutes the others, and a team receiving six notifications a day reads none of them.
There is no hard limit on how many you create, but Zendesk warns that more than 50 may lead to performance issues. That number is far past the point where anybody was reading them anyway.
Send to a person, not to everybody
An alert with a named recipient gets acted on. All team members in your scope is everybody's and therefore nobody's, and it is the option that turns a useful rule into background noise.
Review what fired
After a month, look at how often each rule triggered and what happened. Rules that fire constantly need adjusting; rules that never fire are not doing anything.
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