Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Also required | Workforce Management or Workforce Engagement Management |
| Access | Admin |
Who is in which status right now. Made for running the day as it happens, not for reviewing it afterwards.
What it shows
Current status per agent, how long they have been in it, and how that compares with the schedule. Click Monitoring in the sidebar and select Agent status; the page refreshes every thirty seconds.
What to use it for
Deciding what to do in the next twenty minutes. The queue is building and three people are on a break that has run long, or two are unavailable at a peak.
That is an operational decision, and this page supports it well.
Read the shape, not the rows
How many are available against how many are needed. That comparison is the useful one; the individual rows matter when the total is short and you need to know who to ask.
Which columns appear is your choice, through the pencil icon, and at least one has to stay. A page carrying three columns you actually read beats one carrying all of them.
Approved absence is not a problem to solve
An agent who is off with approved time off counts as in adherence rather than as a gap, and hovering over the row shows the reason. This is worth knowing before you go asking where somebody is.
A long time in one status is a prompt
Often somebody forgot to change it. Sometimes it is a difficult case. Either way it is a reason to ask, not a reason to record.
Do not leave it open all day
Watching live status continuously produces reaction to noise and, if agents know it is being watched, changes their behaviour. A glance at the peaks is enough.
Not a review tool
For anything about a period, use the reporting. This page is the present moment, and using it to form impressions of people is both unfair and unnecessary.
Zendesk is explicit about the division: this page is for what is happening now, and intraday or historical review belongs on the agent activity page. Whatever you wanted to look back at is there, with the context of a whole period around it.
Statuses have to be accurate first
If synchronisation with Support is not set up, this page shows a partial picture: availability, agent status, talk activity and the live workstream all depend on it. Fix that before relying on it for anything.
With it running, one combination is worth watching for. Somebody working a ticket while their status says Offline shows as busy with a warning, and that usually means the status is wrong rather than the person.
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