An activity was tracked incorrectly

Time recorded against the wrong thing. Four causes, and correcting the record is the smaller half of the fix.

Time recorded against the wrong thing. Four causes, and correcting the record is the smaller half of the fix.

Why is agent activity tracked incorrectly?

• Hours attributed to one ticket that clearly did not take that long.
• Large gaps where somebody was working.
• Time against a task the agent did not select.

One: a ticket left open

Check this first. A ticket open in a tab overnight, or while somebody was in a meeting, accumulates time.

Idle timeout is what prevents it, and the thing to check first is whether it exists at all: idle timeout is off by default and has to be selected before Zendesk will infer an agent's status. Plenty of accounts have never turned it on.

You set it per unified agent status on the Status timeouts page in Admin Center, with a value between 5 and 1440 minutes, an idle status and a disconnection status. It can also be left off for individual statuses, which is worth checking before concluding it is on.

An End day automation covers the rest: it ends the day after a defined period of inactivity, for the agents who forget to clock out.

Two: work outside Zendesk

The gap is real work in another system. Nothing is wrong with the tracking; there is no task for what they were doing.

That is a general task to create, not a record to correct.

Three: status not changed

Somebody went to a meeting without changing status, so the time is attributed to whatever was open. Status synchronisation and idle timeout both reduce this, provided idle timeout has been switched on.

Four: the wrong task selected

An agent picked the nearest option from a list that is too long or too vague. If this recurs, the task list is the problem.

Correct the record

The activity can be edited where your permissions allow. Do it promptly, because the adherence rate and occupancy rate for that period are wrong until you do.

Then fix the cause

One correction is housekeeping. A pattern of corrections means idle timeout, the task list or the status setup needs attention, and correcting records weekly is not a solution.

Tell the agent

It is their record. Editing somebody's tracked time without telling them is exactly the behaviour that makes this product feel like surveillance.

See also

• How does Zendesk WFM track agent activity in Zendesk
• The agent activity page
• Setting up general tasks for non-ticket work
• Error: end time cannot fall outside the shift