Creating Zendesk WFM automations

Building a Zendesk WFM automation, and the two questions that decide whether the rule should exist at all.

Building a Zendesk WFM automation, and the two questions that decide whether the rule should exist at all.

Create one

1. In Workforce Management, click the Settings icon and select Automations.
2. Click Create automation and name it for what it watches.
3. Set the run event: Clocked into, Early to, Late to or Out of adherence, with the duration it waits.
4. Set the action: Clock out user, End day, Clock out user, Delete timesheet, End day, Send a message, Shift user to general task or Shift user to untracked time. The two shift actions are unavailable with unified agent status synchronization.
5. Choose who it applies to on the Agents tab, then click Create automation.
6. Watch it for a month before adding another.

A message arrives as a push notification in the recipient's Agent Workspace in Zendesk Support, not by email.

Question one: who acts?

Name the person. A rule with no named recipient produces a notification nobody owns, and those are ignored by design.

Question two: what do they do?

If the answer is "have a look", the rule is not ready. "Move somebody from email to chat" is an action, and that is what makes an alert worth receiving.

Set the threshold from your data

Look at the last three months before choosing a number. A threshold picked from a round figure either fires constantly or never, and both mean it gets ignored.

Start with one

Usually coverage falling below target for an upcoming period. That is the rule worth having before any other, because it looks at a week nobody has got to yet, and a gap found now is a gap you can still fill.

Watch what it fires on

For a month. If it fires most days, the threshold is wrong or the underlying problem is permanent, and a permanent problem needs fixing rather than announcing.

Do not automate anything about individuals

Adherence alerts naming a person arrive as an accusation from a system, and they land badly however they are worded. A lead having a conversation is the right mechanism.

Name it plainly

"Coverage below target, two weeks ahead" tells the next admin what it does. A rule nobody understands is one nobody dares to switch off.

See also

• What Zendesk WFM automations do
• Which Zendesk WFM numbers matter
• Creating auto-approval rules for time off