Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Also required | Workforce Management or Workforce Engagement Management |
| Access | Admin |
Five things worth watching, and where each one comes from. Two of them are not metrics at all, so they are not in the metric list.
| What you want to know | Where it comes from |
| Are people recovering between contacts? | Occupancy rate, reported directly. |
| Is the team working to the schedule? | Adherence rate, reported directly. |
| Do we have enough people at the peaks? | The Required staffing chart on the Forecast page, compared with what you scheduled. There is no coverage metric. |
| Is the forecast any good? | The Inbound volume chart shows where history ends and the forecast begins, so you can compare by eye. There is no accuracy figure. |
| How much scheduled time is not customer work? | Build it: Scheduled time against Paid and Unpaid general task or status time. There is no shrinkage metric. It exists as a forecasting input, which is why people go looking for it as a report. |
Start with the forecast
A schedule built on a poor forecast cannot be right, and no amount of scheduling skill compensates for it. The forecast produces inbound volume estimates and the Full-Time Equivalent calculations behind required staffing, so everything downstream rests on it.
Because there is no accuracy figure, comparing forecast against actual is something you do deliberately: look at the point where history meets forecast on the volume chart, and do it often enough to notice drift.
Shrinkage surprises people
Meetings, training, breaks, coaching, admin. Each is small and together they are not, which is why staffing calculated from headcount comes out short: the headcount counts people, not the hours those people are unavailable. Assembling the figure once from scheduled time against the general task figures replaces an assumption with something you can plan on.
The two that mislead
Occupancy. High is not good, and Zendesk says so in the metric itself: the calculation follows the COPC standard, where 75 to 85 per cent is the benchmark, above 85 per cent means little idle time and burnout, and below 70 per cent means agents are waiting around. A band to stay inside, not a number to push up.
Adherence per person. It measures following a schedule, not working well. An agent staying on a difficult call through their break scores badly and did the right thing. Read it at team level and as a trend: a team drifting from eighty per cent to sixty over a quarter is worth understanding, while one person's figure for one week is noise.
Say what these are used for
Staffing. Agents who believe the numbers are used to assess them will manage their statuses, and then none of this measures anything.
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